The second biggest is the missing need: Most people don't have any advantage of using crypto. They go to work, get a salary, buy/sell things and thats it.
If you don't need to buy something illegal or really believe that there is still a soviety left to take some crypto in worst case scenario, fiat is great.
I have this pet theory that the idea of decentralized currency is a bit ahead of its time, and the best consumer use case is for frequent travelers since you could more easily sidestep foreign exchange issues, and hassles.
There's a bunch of backend and b2b use cases to be explored but those also take time.
> frequent travelers since you could more easily sidestep foreign exchange issues
I don't travel internationally very frequently, but whenever I do my credit card handles currency exchange for me automatically. Perhaps I'm not getting the best exchange rate, but the difference is minimal enough that looking into alternatives isn't worth the hassle.
A paragraph from the previous essay by the OP comes to mind:
> Less sardonically, there is a lesson here: systems which intermediate between cultures are useful. Intermediating between cultures is a thing the world urgently needs and is extremely prepared to pay for.
I don't think decentralized currency will actually solve the issues travelers have with this, at least without reproducing much of the infrastructure already in place for traditional currencies.
In a quasicapitalist utopia, crypto would be a very convenient way to enable the government to set a stock value for a universal cryptocredit and make that credit its default method of value transfer.
They could do something like pin the value to 1 credit = 1 hour of unskilled menial labor, and strictly control the supply.
With appropriate software monitoring and a lack of other methods of direct wealth transfer, it would make it impossible to not properly pay your taxes and vastly more difficult to exchange wealth without government oversight, and make money crimes vastly more difficult, from hiring criminals to do crimes to purchasing drugs and weapons for illicit purposes.
It's the perfect system for a dictatorship as well.
Crypto is complex but I don't think very many people could explain how Visa's merchant payment network functions. It just does, and no one has to think about it.
Yes and thats not the case for crypto. For crypto you need to choose a cryptocoin, need to understand what a wallet is, best case install a secure wallet from the internet etc.
You don't need to know how visa works as long as you know how to register for a cc and know how to put that card into a device when paying.
>Why would you spend crypto when you could get more for it if you wait a week?
that never stopped capitalist from spending their money even if they make profit from their investment. If your logic was true, no one who has access to investment opportunities (eg. the stock market) would ever spend any money.
I think you're taking a stronger interpretation than what I wrote.
I'm not saying no one ever spent any crypto.
I'm saying that because it was deflationary, people tended to spend less than otherwise. This was so bad with bitcoin that it failed to be usable as a currency.
If my logic were true, then when interest rates were higher and people could make more money doing nothing, then people with access to investment opportunities would tend to spend less money.
Visa/Mastercard have settlement times of over 24 hours.
Meanwhile, for over a decade now, Litecoin has had a settlement time of 2.5 minutes. And, for tiny (sub $100) transactions, it’s totally reasonable to just look up the wallet’s holdings in an instant.
For online transactions, you can always let the customer go immediately. Just wait 3 minutes before you ship :P
You are comparing apples to oranges. Settlement times in traditional credit card transactions are not felt by the customer, and provide safeguards for fraud prevention and charge backs. Furthermore, transactions are easily reversible through a claims system. Guess what crypto doesn't have?
This is exactly the apples I’m talking about. Merchants eat much higher fees on behalf of the customer so they can hide the much longer settlement times from the customer and accept that they’ll also have to just eat the occasional fraudulent chargeback from the customer. They put up with all this hassle because “That’s just how it’s always been if you want to do business.”
And, yet people say crypto can’t work because the fees are too high (they’re lower) and the settlement times are too slow (they’re faster).
Dealing with merchant fraud is a legit call-out though. I don’t know what a good crypto solution to that is. I can imagine replacing that department with a smart contract. But, I’ve haven’t looked around to see what’s been tried.
