Comment by K0balt
4 days ago
Yeah. It’s ridiculous how crypto gets so much hate here, yet there are constant, often heart wrenching posts about the failures and even near-malfeasance of payment processing systems. The paradoxical claims that crypto has no use case except fraud and crime, juxtaposed with the lamentation and gnashing of teeth over the misery of traditional payment systems is enough to provoke an existential examination of the senses.
I honestly think it must be mostly sour grapes, since by far, cash and other traditional payment methods facilitate the vast, vast majority of crime and fraud, and cryptocurrency is the only universally accessible, trustless, (nearly) costless, instant, global system for the transfer of value between two parties.
It is by far a better system, even with its flaws. Which is why, yes, many criminals use it, just as they use cash. Because it works.
Nobody claims that crypto doesn't have a use case. They claim that it has failed at its use case. You can't use it to buy things easily or safely. Buying a bunch of crypto on the internet and looking at a graph every day hoping the line goes up isn't useful.
Its use case is still fraud and crime: when laundering money or fencing stolen goods, you expect the process to be difficult, dangerous and to have to pay a large fee. Crypto is a clear improvement on older criminal methods. It's not an improvement on credit cards.
Plenty of digital places accepting crypto like Namecheap, Vultr, ..,
Plenty of companies where you can sell and receive whatever currency you prefer. More or less instantly in case of some. Yes also to my EUR/CHF bank account. For Switzerland that's $1000 per day (per service) without any deep verification.
Some banks even offering "instant transfer" where you get a debit card and just pay with the crypto on your account. Swissquote to name one with all proper banking requirements and barely any fees.
Also from the point of a seller that has seen many kind of weird disputed and scams I am happy to not have any of these issues with crypto. This is an very obvious improvement over credit cards.
Not saying the world is fine, but blaming crypto (the most transparent payment method ever) is way to simple and far from our financial reality
Idk, my experience is that it works fine.
Even to the point that the cost of maintaining other payment systems was less cost effective than just dropping them and focusing on crypto only. FWIW we are not a “crypto” business, our focus is kinodynamics.
Our market is global and we are small from a payment perspective in this context, so our case may be a bit of an outlier, but our lived experience does directly contradict your claim.
I agree that speculation and crime is a problem, but the speculation market in global commerce and currency dwarfs crypto, así does the criminal usage of cash, so it’s disingenuously myopic to frame those as a crypto-centric issue.
The relative difficulties of regulation because of the decentralized nature of crypto does make it a hotbed for schemes that wouldn’t be practical under local regulations, but I have a hard time getting riled up about that when we have giant state sponsored gambling industries nearly worldwide.
If you were to compare the impact on criminal activity if you eliminated cash vs eliminating crypto, I think it’s easy to see that eliminating cash would be much more detrimental to criminal activity.
In all, the arguments being made are not at all based on a rational examination of verifiable ground truths. They are almost to a fault emotionally based arguments with a near hysterical pitch woven into them from the start.
It seems like some people fear crypto. I don’t know why, but they do. On some level, they fear the threat it poses to the devil they know, perhaps. Maybe that is why they react the way they do.
I am also amazed by the resistance to change here as there is a system clearly more efficient and transparent. It's just a matter of time in my opinion. BTW you can remove the (nearly) in "(nearly) costless", some solutions provide 0 fees and no inflation.
By more efficient you mean taking hours to settle? And no inflation as in Bitcoin level volatility and up?
I'd love an efficient and cheap option to move funds online - especially for micro payments too. But so far I haven't heard of any crypto option that actually stayed around long enough to prove these things.
Happy to be pointed in the right direction here.
Stablecoins on any number of low cost networks are fine for small payments (I haven’t lost anything, not even $0.01 in 10+years, vs tens of thousands in chargebacks, mostly fraudulent, for credit card processors).
I factor in 2.5% total costs for transaction frictions, historically that is a bit over 3x our actual average cost from payer to bank account, but it would easily cover the occasional loss of a day or two of sales in a catastrophe.
Pick a top 5 stablecoin that has a good reputation and at least 3 years, on a network with at least that, and settle your accounts daily, or whenever the accumulation represents a significant dent if lost.
The approximate aggregate risk-cost of major (top 10) stablecoins is somewhere south of .001% per day, and is better than the aggregate risk-cost of national fiat currencies, which unremarkably collapse or suffer catastrophic inflation and rebasing on a regular basis. There are frequently several undergoing this process at any given time.
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