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Genuine question - why would someone hold bitcoin for regular, everyday purchases? The buying power is all over the place.
by aantix 2mo ago
Genuine question - why would someone hold bitcoin for regular, everyday purchases?
The buying power is all over the place.
- mothballed 2mo agoThis has tradfi banking ramps. You don't need to hold it. You can treat BTC as basically a payment network instead of something like the visa/mastercard cartel.
- Retr0id 2mo agoafaict, the main advantages of buying things with crypto are (potentially) lower transaction fees and latencies, and less red tape restricting who can buy what from whom. If you use a "tradfi onramp", doesn't it negate all of that? Why not just use tradfi all the way, for that transaction?
- mothballed 2mo agoThere is no requirement to use the tradfi ramps. It is merely offered as an option. But as it pertains to banking in the USA, a couple differentiating qualities I will offer before the goalposts will inevitably be shifted yet again to damn my response 1) Settlement time (wires only sporadically free in US, plus usually settle slower) 2) Irreversibility. 3) The tradfi ramps, if used, only have to be OK with crypto ramp, rather than the whole host of underlying transactions. It is conceivable some banks will tolerate crypto while not tolerating, say, directly handling a particular transaction. 4) Lowered friction for international transaction 5) One or both sides can be unbanked.
- jancsika 2mo ago> (potentially) lower transaction fees <transactionFeeDiscussion> Citation needed. I'm looking at the transaction fees for lightning network and they are in the range of FedNow or RTP. For Bitcoin it's not even close. </transactionFeeDiscussion>
- greyface- 2mo agoEven if you're willing to operate fully in the "tradfi" system, your counterparty might not be, and you still want their business.
- stymaar 2mo agoThis was thr original intent of thr Satoshi paper, except BTC is probably the worst payment network you can think about, which is why it failed to gain any use as such over the past 18 years…
- lesuorac 2mo agoWorst for whom? Lack of chargeback risk seems nice for businesses.
- atomic_cowprod 2mo agoOnly if they're on the receiving end. You need to remember that businesses also buy things, and often by credit card. Chargebacks exist in the real world because long, long ago people recognized that electronic payment systems are fertile soil for scammers. The "lack of chargeback risk" that cryptobros keep chirping about is nowhere near the flex they think it is.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- stymaar 2mo agoThis! And this is why the “crypto” world is full of scams and heists, in a way that anyone with a brain could have foreseen from the start.
- KetoManx64 2mo agoIt's a flex when you compare it to a government based currency where the bank or government can freeze your bank accounts or just empty it. Plenty of stories from The USA and Canada from the last decade of that very thing being done.
- atomic_cowprod 2mo agoSure. The vast majority of those stories being the freezing of proceeds from criminal activity or funds that are part of a legal dispute and for which there is a high probability that the holder of those funds will attempt to illegally hide or move those funds. Again, this is by design. Such safeguards exist for a good reason. They are tools that are as necessary as a policeman's gun. Yes, they are tools that can be (and have been) abused and for which there should also be guardrails and oversight in place. But saying that crypto is better than "government based currency" because crypto has no such safeguards in place is the same thing as saying Wal Mart security officers are better than police officers because they don't carry guns. It is a naive thought at best.
- tenuousemphasis 2mo agoYes, it goes up and down. Fiat currency only goes down. It's a lot more fungible than stocks.
- dfish 2mo agoSomeone who doesn't have good fiat rails like third-world countries. Or people who just don't want to be part of the fiat system. Or both.
- BeetleB 2mo agoPeople in other countries trying to buy stuff from US ecommerce sites. A number of payment processors really don't care about them, and simply will not let customers from there buy using a credit card.
- OJFord 2mo agoJust this week I couldn't purchase from Walmart.ca with a CAD denominated card for delivery to Canada, because my billing address was not in Canada or the US.
- dewey 2mo agoI was talking to someone running an ecommerce site, they also run their own lighning nodes and there's many reasons: - High risk customers that the shop can accept if there's no chargeback option. For these users that are excluded from many ecommerce shops that's a good option and they are willing to jump through some hoops - Customers from countries that are restricted from using VISA / Mastercard - People from countries with active sanctions against.
- varispeed 2mo ago> with active sanctions against. Wouldn't that be breaking the law selling to them?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]