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hodder

The biggest problem is actual uptake for real transactions, as opposed to speculation and black markets.

The 2 biggest barriers to be solved are:

-lack of trust/ease of use for the layman

-volatility

These problems may or may not sort themselves out with time.

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Even if I could use it for regular transactions, I’d still need a reason to want to.

If the justification is “you don’t need to pay credit processing fees” then things would have to be priced cheaper. But I think you’d have to pay me more than the credit card fee to give up the ability to do chargebacks for a lot of online transactions.

Maybe I’d use it for making donations where I’m not expecting anything back from a transaction that the other party could fail to deliver.

They’re just not solving a problem that I have.

Certain use cases are currently very difficult/too expensive on current payment rails (Card networks, ACH etc.). Whilst I am not bullish on using Crypto directly. I think a clearing layer that can be settled with crypto can create a very interesting space for real time value exchange. We are currently working in the space on Interledger.

Is it a project that hasn't been released yet ? Or by "clearing layer that can be settled with crypto" you simply mean route ILP payments between two currencies with crypto in the middle ?

The latter. The underlying settlement is separate concern to clearing. Crypto just makes settlement easier for low-zero trust environments or situations where you want to manage liquidity better.

I think there are some use cases where it makes sense. For instance, I have somewhat of a split life between the US and Europe, and I really wanted cryptocurrency to succeed as a cheap way of moving money between currencies.

I played around with bitcoin a bit in 2015, and it back then it was a pretty good experience. Transactions were quick and cheap. The problem is it seems to have gotten less usable in almost every way since then.

Bitcoin certainly got enormously slower. But the other major currencies (ethereum, xrp, etc) are both much faster and more liquid than BTC was in 2015.

> Bitcoin certainly got enormously slower.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-confirmationtim...

Average block time data doesn't agree with you, or are you talking about something else?

It's not about whether the next block will come on time, it's whether your transaction will be in it.

That has only been an issue around the Dec '17 congestion. I can have my transaction mined in the next block for the satoshi equivalent of $0.61 today.

That's interesting, I didn't know it speeded up again. I guess it still is an issue though: it's hard to trust a currency with the knowledge that it's transaction speed could potentially slow down by hours or days if there is too much traffic.

Sure, let me give an example of a problem that it solves.

Censorship resistant transactions.

Back in 2010, for example, banks blocked all transactions being sent to WikiLeaks, even though they broke no laws, and we're never charged with a crime.

So even though, these were not illegal transactions, banks blocked them anyway. But the crypto transactions weren't!

So, this is an example where perfectly legal bank transactions were blocked, but the crypto payments weren't.

There is an even bigger problem:

-a lack of reason to use cryptocurrencies when centralized alternatives perform much better for non-illegal usecases

Centralized alternatives work perfectly well until they fail (corruption, mismanagement, war, police state .. ). And when this happens there will be decentralized alternatives ready.

Even bigger than that is the treatment of dollar-denominated "value" of crypto as a capital gain. Tax adherence trumps volatility by far.

I disagree. Wallets exist that are as easy to use (for small sums) as Venmo.

I stopped using Bitcoin for daily transactions because of the stress of having to report every coffee purchase on my tax return.

I would say remembering to pay capital gains tax on a coffee transaction is pretty shitty too.

Black market transactions are as real as any other. Real payment for real goods or services.

Bitcoin is looking pretty weak over the last couple of weeks!

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