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Comment by fasteddie31003 | Hacker News Reader

The pandemic is speeding up change in the world. The transition to crypto currencies is happening faster than ever. Lots of people who are resistant to change are going to miss the boat and are going to be stuck holding the anchor that is the massive over leveraged debt in the fiat currency world.

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> The transition to crypto currencies is happening faster than ever

Except I have yet to see any convincing indicators that crypto currency is actually being used for day to day transactions.

Everything I see suggests people are hoping it's the next gold rush and they'll strike it rich based on timing alone.

(Which is not to say I don't sometimes think about how back in 2011 I toyed with the idea of buying 1000 bitcoins just for kicks when they were ~$1 each.)

How did people buy bitcoins back in 2011? Did you have to send a check to the seller?

MtGox and BitStamp were the two biggest exchanges back then.

paypal worked, as long as you had a reputation (and therefore wouldn't chargeback).

It was also trivial to mine it yourself back then, first with CPU then with GPU.

Some miners dabbled with FPGAs in 2012-2013, but the difficulty adjustment wasn't hit hard until ASICs started being used in 2013. Since then it's only been profitable to use the latest few generations of ASICs.

Except that Tether is far worse than anything that exists in the fiat world, and crypto has thus far not been used for anything other than a distributed pump and dump that can't be shutdown or delisted.

Are there any evidence people are using it more and not just buying into the speculation frenzy?

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