Comment by justauserid

For most people, who are end users, it's really not that simple and no you are not wrong.

This comment is a tangent to the article and my experience of trying to use crypto for the first time few weeks ago after watching it from pretty much the day 0. Maybe day 2 or 3 as when bitcoin was launched I was few months shy of leaving college and I just thought it was just an "Internet thing" like many of us did. And I am aware that evne among decentralsied coins BTC might not have been the first, but let's just say it was.

So a few weeks ago, I wanted to make some payment to some sites. There were/are 4-5; one of them is openrouter and similar, but there's one that helps with Linux ISOs. I definitely didn't want to leave my credit card number on those sites (not even on openrotuer). I am wary of leaving my credit card numbers to sites outside my home country India. It's not about better or worse security, it's just about a sense of comfort, or maybe even habit.

There was no expectation or plan for anonymity, privacy whatsoever. Though I would not have minded a bit of privacy on those immediate businesses/sites – as in if someone hacked their systems/DBs they'd find my throwaway email and crypto address (maybe) but if some legal entity investigated they could easily trace it back to my via exchanges and I was fine with that. Yes, I could explore temporary cards and everything but I still had to manage things more than I wanted to.

I created accounts on three crypto exchanges (one was Binance, two from India). I needed those to be complaint to my country's fin/tax laws and I dind't want to deal with anything even remotely p2p (oh, it's quite active here and rarely ends well for end or occasional users like me).

The crowded UX, dark patterns, and absolutely no easy way to figure out how can I just:

- buy some coins

- transfer to my personal wallet (this is deliberately not made straightforward and on some exchanges downright impossible – sometimes hiding it behind some sort of eligibility to do so and even that is hidden further behind some sort of automatic and random eligibility check process)

- get done with it

were just too much. Add to it that I learnt I had to buy some other type of coin(s) just to pay for the gas (chain/network exepenses?). Then suddenly there were additional KYC requirements from payment related parties and then a request for a recorded video of myself.

At that point I was done and had all three of my KYC'ed account closed.

I have always felt crypto coins were a bit weird (as anything unusual feels) but I had never tried it and had assumed as weird as those sounded, those would be very easy to use. How wrong I was. It's a mess and not only because at the end of the day it had to be complaint to real world finance regulations which is what it was supposed to replace in the first place - or was part of the popular appeal at least. It's just a complicated, often costly, and quite often slow mess.

Luckily Apple Pay launched in my country around that time and I was able to use that instead (otherwise I was going to dust off my ancient PayPal a/c) and Apple Pay is an underimplimented and under-supported thing in its own right but that's another story.