All money is fiat money. It has an agreed upon value outside of its intrinsic worth. If you want to get away from fiat money you have to go back to barter.
It’s backed by math. There is a fixed amount of Bitcoin. We have never had the concept of “digital scarcity” before. There are thousands of computers running independently that are following a consensus algorithm. it’s an open, permisionless, trustless system that anyone on the planet can be part of.
You would rather have money controlled by corrupt governments? Hilarious.
That is part of the problem. As long as the economy grows, then Bitcoin is deflationary. This encourages people who have it to hoard it, rather than to move it around and drive the economy. It is almost perfectly designed to be used as a speculative investment rather than an actual day-to-day currency.
Having a fixed pool of money to represent your economy only makes sense if the total value of the economy will never change. This doesn’t happen in the real world. Populations grow, new technologies add value, and poverty generally goes down. This is all fairly simple math.
Bitcoin is digital gold. Other cryptocurrencies will become used as well for basic payments. Eventually you will be able to pay cross chain so it wont even matter which coins you hold.
Amid all of this, nobody has managed to give me a reason why I would want to use crypto for transactions instead of my debit/credit card.
Crypto doesn’t come with any of the consumer protections I expect from my current payment methods. And in fact, it is designed to make some of them literally impossible (I.e. chargebacks). This might be appealing to sellers, but financial transactions are a buyers market. Sellers hate dealing with PayPal, but they put up with it because consumers trust PayPal and demand to use it.
So right now, crypto has these problems:
It is riskier to me than my current solutions.
Even with PoS, it is an order of magnitude more energy intensive than current centralized solutions. The the energy cost for just McDonald’s to replace all their credit card transactions with Ethereum would be staggering.
Most importantly, it does not solve any problems I have that other solutions do not. There needs to be a reason for consumers to change their habits. You can’t build your sales pitch on intangible benefits that are only relevant to a tiny minority.
It’s been over a decade and blockchains are still a neat technology without a useful practical application.
All money is fiat money. It has an agreed upon value outside of its intrinsic worth. If you want to get away from fiat money you have to go back to barter.
That’s not true. Fiat money is money created and managed by a government. We need separation of State and Money.
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
So you prefer your currency to backed by the full faith and credit of… nobody? And you think you’re not being duped. Hilarious.
It’s backed by math. There is a fixed amount of Bitcoin. We have never had the concept of “digital scarcity” before. There are thousands of computers running independently that are following a consensus algorithm. it’s an open, permisionless, trustless system that anyone on the planet can be part of.
You would rather have money controlled by corrupt governments? Hilarious.
That is part of the problem. As long as the economy grows, then Bitcoin is deflationary. This encourages people who have it to hoard it, rather than to move it around and drive the economy. It is almost perfectly designed to be used as a speculative investment rather than an actual day-to-day currency.
Having a fixed pool of money to represent your economy only makes sense if the total value of the economy will never change. This doesn’t happen in the real world. Populations grow, new technologies add value, and poverty generally goes down. This is all fairly simple math.
It’s a great place to store and hold wealth.
The concept you are describing is Gresham’s Law. https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/how-does-greshams-law-relate-to-bitcoin
Bitcoin is digital gold. Other cryptocurrencies will become used as well for basic payments. Eventually you will be able to pay cross chain so it wont even matter which coins you hold.
Edit: Using ChainLink: https://twitter.com/0xShmn/status/1696169139168059896
Amid all of this, nobody has managed to give me a reason why I would want to use crypto for transactions instead of my debit/credit card.
Crypto doesn’t come with any of the consumer protections I expect from my current payment methods. And in fact, it is designed to make some of them literally impossible (I.e. chargebacks). This might be appealing to sellers, but financial transactions are a buyers market. Sellers hate dealing with PayPal, but they put up with it because consumers trust PayPal and demand to use it.
So right now, crypto has these problems:
It’s been over a decade and blockchains are still a neat technology without a useful practical application.