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Comment by hjk05 | Hacker News Reader

I tried to buy a cup of coffee recently at a bitcoin only cafe. Though I didn’t end up paying with bitcoin because it took a day for the bitcoin atm deposit to clear. So I asked a friend who worked in the building to spot me a cup of coffee, and he paid... by making a line on a piece of paper they used to do bookkeeping denoted in fiat because no-one wanted to go through the hassle of bitcoin transfers and no one had enough trust in the currency to keep prices in bitcoins, so they just tracked the costs in fiat. All of this in a “bitcoin only” cafe.

Bitcoin as a penny-stock investment opportunity still seems successful, but as a viable currency it seems to have failed. And now cue the people saying that bitcoin was never actually intended to be used like a digital coin...

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So you have bitcoin, visit bitcoin only cafes, and yet you or the business cant figure out how to pay for a cup of coffee with bitcoin...

It’s hard to tell if this is a joke, trolling, manifestation of dystopia/idiocracy.

All that’s really needed now is an underlying story of how the cafe couldn’t figure out how to accept payment, but due to being “bitcoin only” they received wild media attention and became an influencer, got SV capital investment, pivoted to a freemium model just giving away their bitcoin only coffee for free, gained market share over Starbucks thanks to SV Venture capital subsidizing our coffees and then they go public and the VCs/bitcoin coffee founders make billions unloading onto the public.

I’m so sold I was going to register both bitcoincoffee.com and bitcoincafe.com, looks like some savvy founders already beat me to the punch.

Now that they reincarnated the pets.com business model anything seems possible...

From what I can tell the only way to obtain bitcoin without providing personal information is to find someone on Craigslist willing to transfer you some coin... for a 15% markup.

EDIT: That's the bigger failure

The bigger failure here is the law that requires this

If you think that's bad markup, try money laundering without crypto!

SCNR

You can always mine it.

Yes, Bitcoin is a poor fit for face-to-face transactions, but that doesn't mean it failed.

Replace 'bitcoin' with 'gold bars' in your first paragraph then it'd make more sense for both you and the Gold Bar only cafe, I guess.

Don't forget high transaction costs for BTC.

Currently about 12 cents US.

12 cents is a lot, since it is static regardless of the transaction size. Small transactions at 12 cents fee are ridiculously expensive. You need low fee + 0-conf for small transactions (e.g. BCH). 12 cents is negligible for large transactions, hence why people call it a store of value. And since bitcoin doesn't scale, transaction costs will skyrocket again to crazy transaction fees of 50-100$ easily if it starts being used.

Where are you getting this? Why does bitinfocharts.com show a Median transaction fee of $1.85 ?

It's definitely not $1.85 lol. You can try sending a few sats between your own wallets to test it if you're genuinely curious.

From actual use, buying stuff online. Most recent was a year of vultr.com VPS service.

There is your problem. You are assuming BTC is Bitcoin. The actual Bitcoin, working as intended, is BCH.

I'm curious how people still consider BCH a viable currency after the 51% attack done "in good faith" by a major mining pools BTC.top and BTC.com [1]. What's to stop them from doing it again the next time it's convenient?

[1]: https://twitter.com/TheCryptoconomy/status/11319624478232780...

The "51% attack" was in the financial interest to the miners. An actual attack would not be.

I mean, its Bitcoin, the worst from all the cryptos. In the meantime I am using Ethereum to get electricity to my home (via lition.io), use it to take a collaterized debt position (via MakerDAO) and spending crypto daily in seconds with the Coinbase debit card. Just days ago I paid for my NordVPN directly with Ether, the transaction cleared in under 30 seconds. Bitcoin was the experiment, Ethereum is the working, usable product (which will only get better in the future).

You can use the bitcoin lightning network like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39KpscRXyXY

It doesn't matter what it was intended for, which it very well may have failed at. What matters is the value people see in it now. The claim is it represents digital gold bars.

Bitcoin is more like "gold coin" currency, regarding its volatility at least. Its use cases as everyday currency are more or less limited to illegal drugs.

I wonder if the Bitcoin-only marketing is really helping them get more customers. It seems the opposite.

Are they doing it from a pure ideological perspective?

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