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Comment by danmaz74 | Hacker News Reader

> Cryptocurrencies are still 100% hype & speculation; a solution in search of a problem.

Without any sarcasm: I saw them in use twice during the last 6 months in a very real use case, ie, hackers requesting a ransom (in the first case it was BTC, in the second it was Monero, which makes even more sense AFAIK).

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Might depend on your social circle, some groups might use it more then others. I have seen them being used much more frequently (and way beyond ransomware scenarios). For instance Bitcoin debit cards (e.g Ten X) are quite common and for those that got in the market early, it's a cheap way of buying anything. In some countries it's not even a taxable event to spend it. Still not perfect in the sense of having to use Visa, and down the road transactions will be much more direct when more merchants will start directly accepting crypto currencies.

my friends and I send BTC, LTC, ETH to each other instead of paypal, bank transfer, or cash

typically one of us pays the bill with a credit card and the others send him crypto to settle. same with selling electronics to each other and paying rent.

Isn't it incredibly expensive to send BTC for this?

Me and my friends use Venmo. Why would I want to send my friends crypto if I expect its value to increase? I wouldn't also want to receive crypto if I expect it to crash soon. It's simply not practical to adopt crypto in large scale.

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