About 3 or 4 years ago PayPal added the option to buy cryptocurrency, which I thought I’d try. (Dumb idea 🙄)
Part of the sign up process was glitched. I retried and clicked submit one too many times, I guess. Now I’ve been unable to use PayPal for years. They blocked me because THEIR SITE was broken, but the web page essentially accuses me of being a criminal and asks for my bank records. No way in hell.
This was just for me to pay others. I can only imagine how awful PayPal is if you are a vendor.
Fuck PayPal.
So, crypto?
Absolutely. It is absolutely the future of finance.
I know one person who owns crypto, no shops that take it and I know of too many people who speculate with it. If it is the future of finance, that future is still fairly far away.
Well now you know two people who use crypto and I use it as money. I don’t speculate on it. I buy my groceries and pay my cell phone bill and pay my insurance with it. I recently bought a Taylor Swift album with it as well.
I don’t think I could buy my groceries with crypto if I wanted to. What supermarket takes crypto? My phone provider wouldn’t either and my insurance is deducted directly from my paycheque because that’s just how it works here.
Instacart has giftcards you can buy with crypto and so does my cell provider. Sure, you absolutely could say that they don’t accept it directly, and you would be right. However, I still get my groceries in my refrigerator, and I still get service on my cell phone. So, at the end of the day, does it matter?
It’s an extra step. Two extra steps actually. I can go to the store and pay or I can exchange official currency to crypto and then exchange it again to giftcards. It’s good that the possibility exists, since it’s de facto untraceable but it’s inconvenient, slower and frankly unnecessary for most people.
That’s true. Once people start getting paid in it, that’s when it’s really going to take off. I don’t think a majority of people will be paid in it until such a time as their national currencies start to hyper inflate. Ask a person in the United States, Canada, or Europe, if they would want to be paid in crypto, and the vast majority would say no. Ask a person in Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela, Lebanon, etc. If they would like to be paid in crypto, and I’ll bet you’ll get a whole different answer.
And then, who says what crypto will be used? Bitcoin, Etherium, Monero, Dogecoin, any of the other dozens?
And how often do you end up paying more on real money due to the delay in transactions or awful gas fees for your transaction?
Crypto being a common currency is about as likely as Gary Johnson winning the presidential election. The average person is going to take up crypto as much as they use Tor. Both have their uses, but neither one will ever be mainstream.
I think that’s the fundamental disconnect. You may not see it as money, where I do, since I can buy the things I need to survive with it. And I can buy the things that I enjoy with it, which makes it money. Fees have never been a real problem. I mean, 1 US cent for a transaction is nothing
Edit: You and I would be unable to make a trade because we cannot agree on what is valuable. I do not value fiat currencies and you do not value crypto.
And you don’t see how your comment is one of many reasons crypto isn’t the future of money?
Honestly, no. The only money we’ve had in the past that even compares is when we were actually using gold and silver. The problem with those though is that they cannot be stored or sent digitally without the help of a third party whom you then have to trust. Crypto is the future because it has the same value whether you’re in Caracas or Chicago or London or Moscow. It can be transferred anywhere in the world in seconds and settles within 20 minutes, not three business days or more such as the banking system. It is a bearer asset that nobody can take away from you without force and no government can inflate away and leave you poor.
Meaning your money can be stolen and it’s gone forever unless you convince them to return it
Unless your wallet’s password is cracked, then you’re fucked and have no recourse. There have been so many issues with wallets generated with a bad algorithm that allows people to break your phrase easily and leave you without anything. And that’s not even getting into hot wallet issues where you get rug pulled and they steal all your money or you decide to give your money to someone like SBF and the whole exchange does down.
There are so many examples that disprove this statement that it’s honestly hilarious.
No, instead you can get left poor by some scam you fell for and have even less recourse to get your money back than if it was the government.
Can you go to a random store and buy food or goods? Can you send it to your landlord for rent? No, only a small sunset of orgs take it, because everyone else understands that shit like transaction delays and inconsistent gas fees means it’s impossible to effectively run a business on monopoly money that doesn’t have a set worth.
You can consider it to have monetary value, and I do insofar as you’re playing with an unregulated security that should be taxed, but it’s not money in that you can buy an arbitrary good for sale. You’re playing with monopoly bills that someone will agree to pretend is real money, but most businesses will laugh you out of the building and tell you to come back with real money. Because crypto is just a financial asset that people give monetary worth, but it isn’t money.
And Twitter is absolutely the future of social media!
See, we can all post statements that are clearly detached from reality and entirely incorrect.