The report doesn’t seem to address any of the most damning arguments I’ve heard against crypto currently. Namely:
Bitcoin is mostly just a vehicle for speculation and is too slow and expensive to be considered for actual commerce
Nothing about crypto directly solves any of the existing problems with currency, since the problems are social structures and financial incentives brought about as an emergent property of organizations and are not a function of the currency itself (some of the biggest holders of crypto are the same huge investment agencies that created the subprime loan crash in '08)
The fact that blockchains are enormously inefficient, given that unfathomable amounts of redundant work are being done (Visa uses about 1.5 Wh per transaction vs BTC which is about 1,500-2000 kWh, making BTC over one million times less efficient)
In my opinion, there’s a reason why you haven’t been able to do anything with your Crypto besides bet on it for over a decade now. It’s because it’s just a bad product, engineered by techbros who think they know better than the global banking system how to create a decent financial product.
BTC has a performant layer 2 called lightning. And if layer 2s are not your jam, there are plenty of L1s that can handle 1000s of transactions per second
Crypto solves the problem of having a central bank control the money supply. Also having private organizations controlling digital payment rails. Provides options or underbanked people in countries with unstable financial systems. I could go on…
Blockchains do not use an enormous amount of energy. You are thinking of the consensus mechanism used by proof of work cryptocurrencies. There are alternative consensus mechanisms that use much less energy
Also the adoption rates are not a measure of utility. The Linux desktop has been around 30 years and has an adoption rate under 5 percent. Mastodon has not grown as fast as twitter did. Democracy is not used by the majority of governments and where it is, voter turnout is low.
Is it also your opinion that these things are bad products?
Decentralized systems just take longer to mature. It’s crazy to me that fediverse users don’t understand this.
It’s not crazy. You are just shouting into the Gartner trough of disillusionment. Statistics favor an angry opinionated mob currently. I don’t know what the time line is (or I’d be rich) but eventually the response to this sort of comment will move away from grunt and downvote.
With Bitcoin it is simply impossible.
And generally there’s a blockchain trilemma - it should be fast, decentralized and secure, and you can’t make a blockchain that is all three. Bitcoin reasonably sacrifices “fast”, Lightning sacrifices “decentralized”, and so on.
I like the idea behind decentralised currency and I value the ideals of those wanting to free themselves from the four or five financial institutions controlling the world, but the people who want to buy groceries with their Bitcoin are a tiny minority. Cryptocurrency has become a vessel for speculation, fraud, and money laundering, abusing the good intentions of its inventors.
During the Bitcoin hype, some online stores actually started taking cryptocurrency as payment, but few stores still have that option available. For a sweet, short period there was a glimpse of hope for cryptocurrency, but that quickly collapsed.
Your first point accentuates that there are too many options to transfer blockchain money for most normal people. Living in a place where payment terminals in supermarkets don’t accept credit cards (debit card based culture) and where banks decided to go with Maestro rather than Mastercard, I can tell you from experience that “you need to pay with a different thing here” will confuse the hell out of people.
Your second point is actually the problem behind cryptocurrency that’ll make it impossible to use as a real currency. There are no control mechanisms, so the value jumps around wildly. You’d be smart to store your money through cryptocurrencies in countries with explosive inflation (Argentina, Turkey) but when a country’s currency starts to collapse, limits to exchanging money are often the first policies to get inflation back under control, so there’s a real risk you’ll end up unable to access your money because banks suddenly refuse to take your return transfer.
Your third point is kind of invalidated by the fact you default to naming Lightning as your primary fast transaction mechanism, since it operates on Bitcoin which is stuck in the PoW world and probably always will be. It’s major competitor Ethereum is kind of okay these days, but gas prices make it useless for doing any real payments so you’ll end up using some kind of wrapper for that too.
You can’t compare a form of government to a product, so I’m not sure what the democracy argument is about.
And let’s be honest, for mainstream consumers, the Linux desktop and the Fediverse are failures. How many of your real life friends and family have a Lemmy account compared to Facebook or Twitter? Even within my tech nerd bubble most people stick with mainstream services and mainstream operating systems. The best thing to happen to the Linux desktop was Valve picking it up and stuffing it into a console. Android deserves an honorable mention, but they way that got Linux into the mainstream was to hide Linux as much as possible. Twitter started collapsing and Bluesky and fucking Threads ate Mastodon’s lunch. The Fediverse sure has grown, but unless you’re into Linux or computers, you won’t find a Twitter or even Reddit alternative here.
Even still, I myself can get my social media itch scratched by the Fediverse, but I still can’t pay for my groceries through Dogecoin or Lightning or Ethereum.
There are also reasons why I’m not planning on using an iteration of cryptocurrency for real life finances even if such a thing becomes available. Most importantly, the public payment history associated with wallets. It’s not exactly difficult to link wallets to companies once they start operating at larger scales and soon enough you’ll have companies selling your payment history (and wage/employer history) straight off the blockchain. Unfortunately, that’s not really something that can be fixed with the current model.
There’s also the theft problem: if someone steals my bank account details and uses it to transfer all of my money to a foreign country, my bank will lock down my account and probably call me. Steal my wallet seed phrase and everything is gone in an instant, with no recourse. This adds major risk to keeping any significant amount of money in cryptocurrency form, and both enthusiasts and professionals have lost millions upon billions this way.
And let’s be honest, for mainstream consumers, the Linux desktop and the Fediverse are failures.
My point is that just because something doesn’t achieve widespread adoption immediately does not mean it is a failure. I use both Linux desktop and the Fediverse and the fact that they are not in widespread use doesn’t rob them of virtue for the people that use them. Technology adoption is a complex thing and its incredibly reductionist to just say "crypto has been around for a decade and a half and you still can’t use it for anything therefore its a failure. Our legacy financial system is very entrenched and its not to going to unseated overnight. These things take time.
Ultimately I think it should come down to consumer choice, those that prefer centralized finance should use that and those that are OK with the added overheard of decentralized finance should be able to have that choice. That is why I make the analogy to these other systems. Linux desktop for a long time was harder to use but it was worth it for people whose values aligned with open source software. Crypto has a similar trajectory and faces similar uphill battles including negative attitudes from those using competing systems. But for those who value what it provides, it is worth it.
I think the reason s lot of people don’t think crypto is a useful currency is because they’ve tried to use it to buy drugs and the process is awkward, slow, incredibly expensive, and messy.
There are so many little steps where someone else takes a cut of your money and waiting to see if the transaction goes through is agonisingly long. When buying weed it’s understandable but no one is going to accept that for anything where there’s other options.
Being pro crypto doesn’t make you more experienced, it just makes you a gullible idiot who falls for scams. Also 🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓
There are but virtually no one uses them, and I’m sure if they did they would take it away the due to the aforementioned issues. It’s just kind of a mess. It’s not not a good vehicle for commerce and it never has been.
The burden of proof is on you for making the original claim, I’ll provide stats once you do. The mere fact that these companies exist and have provided these services for years should ample proof to most people who want to have a discussion.
I’m happy to briefly address those for you. For starters I’m only referring to Bitcoin, and not other “crypto”.
The base layer is indeed “to slow and expensive” to make day to day purchases such as coffee. However layer 2 applications built on top of the base layer, such as the lighting network, enable nearly instant transactions extremely cheaply.
Bitcoin solves many problems with existing currencies, all you have to do is look to countries with failed economic systems. Or the billion people around the world who lack access to even the most basic financial services, such as banking. You may not see a use for it but people living under failed regimes do.
This is much more complicated and it’s difficult to explain the advantages of securing a monetary system with energy in a concise way so I’ll instead say this. The energy necessary to secure the network is indeed a cost, but without a complete understanding of Bitcoin you cannot evaluate if it is outweighed by the benefits. Of course I believe the benefits far outweigh the cost.
I fail to see how crypto or BTC alleviates the problems with fiat that exist under failed regimes. If anything I feel like it would exacerbate them given that crypto operates on a public, append-only ledger that gives disproportionate power to those that leverage their existing influence and are able to interact with the ledger in bad faith/deceptively. Empowering the unbanned unbanked is a common talking point but I don’t see it actually becoming real outside of a few niche cases that tend to be exaggerated in crypto spaces. And even then I’m not sure those will stick around in the long run.
I will believe in initiatives like the lightning network when they actually see mass adoption. I personally don’t see that happening because of the aforementioned problems. Scalability and practicality compared to existing standards being the primary ones.
Power is still an issue considering BTC uses as much electricity as a small nation despite being the hobby of a few hundred thousand people, versus the entire global banking industry which is a million times more efficient as things stand currently. I don’t think “but it’s worth it because BTC is good” is really a good counter to that. It’s not sustainable.
Also “it’s too complicated to explain” isn’t a particularly persuasive argument lol.
To add to this concern, centralized currency has its pros. Because it’s centralized, it can be governed. If I wire some money to an unintended target, sometimes that money can be recovered. There’s plenty of stories of people getting unexpected deposits into their bank accounts from their payroll company and everyone tells them to report it and not touch it.
Then there’s the Seth Green incident where he got phished and someone stole his IP rights to his bored ape. If the ape NFTs were centralized, Seth could have reported the fraud and had it returned.
How would this work at scale? Imagine if a company like Apple got their keys leaked and someone siphoned millions of currency away from them. Does Apple just take the loss? What if your grandma gets her account stolen, she just loses her retirement with no recourse?
I’m quite happy that the legal system backed by the police and military are backing up my fiat.
There’s plenty of stories of people getting unexpected deposits into their bank accounts from their payroll company and everyone tells them to report it and not touch it.
This sort of thing basically happened to me once with crypto and I literally just kept it, was great, minor miracle since I didn’t know how I was gonna pay rent that month and it was basically the full amount.
Imagine if a company like Apple got their keys leaked and someone siphoned millions of currency away from them. Does Apple just take the loss?
Yes. Realistically though big companies wanting to custody large amounts of crypto are outsourcing this to reputable third parties like Coinbase specializing in secure crypto storage. Probably have insurance on it also.
The report doesn’t seem to address any of the most damning arguments I’ve heard against crypto currently. Namely:
In my opinion, there’s a reason why you haven’t been able to do anything with your Crypto besides bet on it for over a decade now. It’s because it’s just a bad product, engineered by techbros who think they know better than the global banking system how to create a decent financial product.
What you are saying is inaccurate…
BTC has a performant layer 2 called lightning. And if layer 2s are not your jam, there are plenty of L1s that can handle 1000s of transactions per second
Crypto solves the problem of having a central bank control the money supply. Also having private organizations controlling digital payment rails. Provides options or underbanked people in countries with unstable financial systems. I could go on…
Blockchains do not use an enormous amount of energy. You are thinking of the consensus mechanism used by proof of work cryptocurrencies. There are alternative consensus mechanisms that use much less energy
Also the adoption rates are not a measure of utility. The Linux desktop has been around 30 years and has an adoption rate under 5 percent. Mastodon has not grown as fast as twitter did. Democracy is not used by the majority of governments and where it is, voter turnout is low.
Is it also your opinion that these things are bad products?
Decentralized systems just take longer to mature. It’s crazy to me that fediverse users don’t understand this.
It’s not crazy. You are just shouting into the Gartner trough of disillusionment. Statistics favor an angry opinionated mob currently. I don’t know what the time line is (or I’d be rich) but eventually the response to this sort of comment will move away from grunt and downvote.
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With Bitcoin it is simply impossible. And generally there’s a blockchain trilemma - it should be fast, decentralized and secure, and you can’t make a blockchain that is all three. Bitcoin reasonably sacrifices “fast”, Lightning sacrifices “decentralized”, and so on.
I like the idea behind decentralised currency and I value the ideals of those wanting to free themselves from the four or five financial institutions controlling the world, but the people who want to buy groceries with their Bitcoin are a tiny minority. Cryptocurrency has become a vessel for speculation, fraud, and money laundering, abusing the good intentions of its inventors.
During the Bitcoin hype, some online stores actually started taking cryptocurrency as payment, but few stores still have that option available. For a sweet, short period there was a glimpse of hope for cryptocurrency, but that quickly collapsed.
Your first point accentuates that there are too many options to transfer blockchain money for most normal people. Living in a place where payment terminals in supermarkets don’t accept credit cards (debit card based culture) and where banks decided to go with Maestro rather than Mastercard, I can tell you from experience that “you need to pay with a different thing here” will confuse the hell out of people.
Your second point is actually the problem behind cryptocurrency that’ll make it impossible to use as a real currency. There are no control mechanisms, so the value jumps around wildly. You’d be smart to store your money through cryptocurrencies in countries with explosive inflation (Argentina, Turkey) but when a country’s currency starts to collapse, limits to exchanging money are often the first policies to get inflation back under control, so there’s a real risk you’ll end up unable to access your money because banks suddenly refuse to take your return transfer.
Your third point is kind of invalidated by the fact you default to naming Lightning as your primary fast transaction mechanism, since it operates on Bitcoin which is stuck in the PoW world and probably always will be. It’s major competitor Ethereum is kind of okay these days, but gas prices make it useless for doing any real payments so you’ll end up using some kind of wrapper for that too.
You can’t compare a form of government to a product, so I’m not sure what the democracy argument is about.
And let’s be honest, for mainstream consumers, the Linux desktop and the Fediverse are failures. How many of your real life friends and family have a Lemmy account compared to Facebook or Twitter? Even within my tech nerd bubble most people stick with mainstream services and mainstream operating systems. The best thing to happen to the Linux desktop was Valve picking it up and stuffing it into a console. Android deserves an honorable mention, but they way that got Linux into the mainstream was to hide Linux as much as possible. Twitter started collapsing and Bluesky and fucking Threads ate Mastodon’s lunch. The Fediverse sure has grown, but unless you’re into Linux or computers, you won’t find a Twitter or even Reddit alternative here.
Even still, I myself can get my social media itch scratched by the Fediverse, but I still can’t pay for my groceries through Dogecoin or Lightning or Ethereum.
There are also reasons why I’m not planning on using an iteration of cryptocurrency for real life finances even if such a thing becomes available. Most importantly, the public payment history associated with wallets. It’s not exactly difficult to link wallets to companies once they start operating at larger scales and soon enough you’ll have companies selling your payment history (and wage/employer history) straight off the blockchain. Unfortunately, that’s not really something that can be fixed with the current model.
There’s also the theft problem: if someone steals my bank account details and uses it to transfer all of my money to a foreign country, my bank will lock down my account and probably call me. Steal my wallet seed phrase and everything is gone in an instant, with no recourse. This adds major risk to keeping any significant amount of money in cryptocurrency form, and both enthusiasts and professionals have lost millions upon billions this way.
My point is that just because something doesn’t achieve widespread adoption immediately does not mean it is a failure. I use both Linux desktop and the Fediverse and the fact that they are not in widespread use doesn’t rob them of virtue for the people that use them. Technology adoption is a complex thing and its incredibly reductionist to just say "crypto has been around for a decade and a half and you still can’t use it for anything therefore its a failure. Our legacy financial system is very entrenched and its not to going to unseated overnight. These things take time.
Ultimately I think it should come down to consumer choice, those that prefer centralized finance should use that and those that are OK with the added overheard of decentralized finance should be able to have that choice. That is why I make the analogy to these other systems. Linux desktop for a long time was harder to use but it was worth it for people whose values aligned with open source software. Crypto has a similar trajectory and faces similar uphill battles including negative attitudes from those using competing systems. But for those who value what it provides, it is worth it.
I think the reason s lot of people don’t think crypto is a useful currency is because they’ve tried to use it to buy drugs and the process is awkward, slow, incredibly expensive, and messy.
There are so many little steps where someone else takes a cut of your money and waiting to see if the transaction goes through is agonisingly long. When buying weed it’s understandable but no one is going to accept that for anything where there’s other options.
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Dude makes shitty argument to propel position that is wrong
Dude is disproven by someone more experienced in the field
Everyone: 🤓🤓🤓 What a toxic nerd
Being pro crypto doesn’t make you more experienced, it just makes you a gullible idiot who falls for scams. Also 🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓🤓
Do you not have stores that let you pay with bitcoin and other crypto? It’s a thing in Canada atleast.
There’s some in the US too.
There are but virtually no one uses them, and I’m sure if they did they would take it away the due to the aforementioned issues. It’s just kind of a mess. It’s not not a good vehicle for commerce and it never has been.
Weird that it works in other places…
It works as a marketing strategy to virtue signal to tech fetishists, but nearly no one actually uses these services.
Can I see your statistics on Crypto POS that you used to come to those conclusions?
Starbucks accepts crypto just so you are aware, it’s far more common than you are leading people to believe.
Then please provide evidence that these services are actually being used if you are so
confusedconvinced that is the case.The burden of proof is on you for making the original claim, I’ll provide stats once you do. The mere fact that these companies exist and have provided these services for years should ample proof to most people who want to have a discussion.
BTC processed 93.1 million transactions in 2022 while Visa (just Visa) did 192.5 billion. Not very popular as a payment method for sure.
Edit: To be clear this the 93.1 million for BTC includes crypto-to-crypto trades.
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Considering the volatility of Bitcoin, those store owners are nuts.
Why it coverts to cash at the POS machine and they are paid in cash?
Again, volatility. When the price isn’t stable, you could lose massively.
It doesn’t matter in the sightest…. If it takes 5 bitcoins or .5 bitcoins the shop still gets their $1.50 for a coffee minus their fee…
I’m sorry you can’t comprehend how this system works and is viable in lots of places.
If 5 bitcoins is suddenly worth 3 bitcoins, the exchange rate will change and the company will lose money. It’s a major gamble.
Huh…. just like any other currency/foreign currency already…
It doesn’t matter to the store, and these companies that provide the services are making profit or they wouldn’t be around anymore.
They charge less fess than credit card companies, they get a cut from every sale, just like credit cards do…
It’s a viable business sorry mate, bark up a different tree.
Wait… you’re saying Starbucks wouldn’t be around anymore if it stopped gambling on Bitcoin?
https://youtu.be/QdQixEQpbAc?si=PDPL-rjk2T9Kiu_l&t=1272
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/QdQixEQpbAc?si=PDPL-rjk2T9Kiu_l&t=1272
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Domt come to lemmy with actual facts, it’s no better than Reddit in this regard. It’s almost like it’s a society issue.
I feel like Lemmy is small enough that my comments might make a small difference lol.
I think proof of state solves some of the energy and efficiency issues, but I agree it’s pretty over hyped.
Edit: thought that was taking about crypto in general, not just BTC. Yeah I absolutely agree.
It is about 99% more efficient than proof of work, making it still enormously inefficient compared to traditional means. Crazy to think about!
I’m happy to briefly address those for you. For starters I’m only referring to Bitcoin, and not other “crypto”.
Hopefully that helps.
I fail to see how crypto or BTC alleviates the problems with fiat that exist under failed regimes. If anything I feel like it would exacerbate them given that crypto operates on a public, append-only ledger that gives disproportionate power to those that leverage their existing influence and are able to interact with the ledger in bad faith/deceptively. Empowering the
unbannedunbanked is a common talking point but I don’t see it actually becoming real outside of a few niche cases that tend to be exaggerated in crypto spaces. And even then I’m not sure those will stick around in the long run.I will believe in initiatives like the lightning network when they actually see mass adoption. I personally don’t see that happening because of the aforementioned problems. Scalability and practicality compared to existing standards being the primary ones.
Power is still an issue considering BTC uses as much electricity as a small nation despite being the hobby of a few hundred thousand people, versus the entire global banking industry which is a million times more efficient as things stand currently. I don’t think “but it’s worth it because BTC is good” is really a good counter to that. It’s not sustainable.
Also “it’s too complicated to explain” isn’t a particularly persuasive argument lol.
To add to this concern, centralized currency has its pros. Because it’s centralized, it can be governed. If I wire some money to an unintended target, sometimes that money can be recovered. There’s plenty of stories of people getting unexpected deposits into their bank accounts from their payroll company and everyone tells them to report it and not touch it.
Then there’s the Seth Green incident where he got phished and someone stole his IP rights to his bored ape. If the ape NFTs were centralized, Seth could have reported the fraud and had it returned.
How would this work at scale? Imagine if a company like Apple got their keys leaked and someone siphoned millions of currency away from them. Does Apple just take the loss? What if your grandma gets her account stolen, she just loses her retirement with no recourse?
I’m quite happy that the legal system backed by the police and military are backing up my fiat.
This sort of thing basically happened to me once with crypto and I literally just kept it, was great, minor miracle since I didn’t know how I was gonna pay rent that month and it was basically the full amount.
Yes. Realistically though big companies wanting to custody large amounts of crypto are outsourcing this to reputable third parties like Coinbase specializing in secure crypto storage. Probably have insurance on it also.
I can buy coffee with crypto at Starbucks. As well as many other store fronts.