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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

If I'm honest I'm a surprised it hasn't fallen further, the only practical use seems to be buying drugs and it's not ideal for that.

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This is a very one sided view on things. I regularly use BTC as alternative for international payments. It's cheaper, faster, more secure and honestly it feels nice to not pay into the hands of visa and master.

Namecheap and FastTech.com being 2 big examples, as well as 2 of 3 of the hosting companies I use accept it.

Not to mention that alternative chains like Eth very well have a practical real world use outside if monetary value.

Edit:// I also order pizza and Chinese with Bitcoin like once a week. Saved me plenty of fees compared to other prepayment methods.

Visa and MC don’t get almost anything, most of the fee goes to your bank.

So, current average fee is about a dollar. Plus you have to pay probably at least 1% to buy it, and the vendor has to pay similar to sell it again, and accept significant exchange risk. I struggle to see how this works out cheaper than, say, paying namecheap with a credit card...

How are you saving on fees when you buy things with bitcoin? The seller pays credit card processing fees, and I don’t see them giving you a discount for paying bitcoin.

In your very specific situation this might work. But problems that a lot of people would face: 1. unreliable local BTC exchanges that increase the risk substantially 2. local banks that will scrutinize or prohibit transfers to/from BTC exchanges 3. cheaper/faster/better options (e.g. SEPA) 4. in some countries it takes weeks to months to setup an account with a BTC exchange

On top of that, international payments are only a PITA because banks are lazy. Banks could easily make the process cheaper and faster if they were so inclined. If BTC ever gains ground in this market, it would not last for long.

With that much fluctuation I disagree that BTC would be cheaper. Especially as it keeps losing in value.

I'd rather pay $10 and know $9.80 goes to the company I am buying from (rest to VISA) than paying some random amount of Bitcoin for the $10 purchase which may be worth $11 or $9 or $20 on the day I purchase.

> I regularly use BTC as alternative for international payments.

But how many people do this? I've sent like one international transfer in my entire life. I'd wager that the median number of international transfers among the US population is zero. In addition, BTC as a means for international transfer is totally decoupled from its price. If 1 BTC is $1 or $1m it works just as well for temporarily buying some and transferring it. This use case wouldn't really drive the price upwards.

Where do you order pizza with bitcoin? The average transaction fee is like US$2 right now [0], so you must either order lots of pizza or not care how much you spend. My average pizza take out is like $20, so tacking on 10% in payment fees is really inferior to just using a credit card (3%) or using Venmo (0%).

5 years ago, maybe. You can buy flight tickets and tech hardware (Newegg) with bitcoin.

This is objectively untrue. You either have no idea what you're talking about and don't use Bitcoin, or you're lying. I've used Bitcoin for years for all kinds of things. I can only surmise this isn't downvoted to oblivion because a lot of people who dislike Bitcoin (or its users) for ideological reasons use HN.

or you're lying

There is no need for that, you can disagree without being impolite.

I use it for buying stuff from aliexpress on the regular.

As far as I can see, aliexpress does not accept bitcoin as a payment method.

http://activities.aliexpress.com/adcms/help-aliexpress-com/p...

http://olodolo.com/

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