Credit card companies in the US are a special kind of evil. They charge huge fees, force vendors not to pass the fees on to customers, and then pretend to be the consumer's best friend by returning a bit of the fees to them.
They insert themselves between buyer and seller, drive prices up, and their customers think they are saving money.
Regardless of what you think about credit card companies, which payment method do you think the average consumer would choose?
1) Pay by credit card, get 2% cash back, reserve option to reverse charges if vendor fails to deliver, don't lose all of your money if you lose your credit card.
2) Pay by Bitcoin, pay $8 transaction fee, wait 10-30 minutes for transaction to be confirmed, resubmit if transaction fee was too low, no recourse if vendor runs away with your money, lose all of your money if you forget your password.
Realistically, any crypto-as-payment service will either charge the merchants large fees (to cover risk, volatility, exchange, transaction costs) and/or collect profit on the exchange rate.
There's no free lunch, but the lunch is definitely not cheaper on the Bitcoin side for average transactions.
Dollar bills don't have any of the advantages you mentioned either. How fast and secure do you think mailing them to some company is?
A lot of these arguments are really just cherry-picking whichever portion of the financial system best suits your argument at the time and pretending they're only possible if they're built on top of pieces of paper.
No one mails paper dollar bills around.
Bitcoin always sounds fantastic when compared to these straw-man alternate universes where everyone is mailing dollar bills around, but let's stick to reality where no one does that.
> pretending they're only possible if they're built on top of pieces of paper.
USD isn't literally built on top of paper money. Cryptocurrency, however, is literally invented out of thin air by programmers. New cryptocurrencies are released every week. Even Bitcoin gets forked at times.
Right, and that somehow didn't stop USD credit cards from existing.
But for BTC it's either the base chain is better for every single use case or it's a giant waste of time.
> USD isn't literally built on top of paper money.
Right, there's also virtual USD and then there's all the USD above M1 that doesn't even exist as physical dollars or Fed reserves but is just willed into existence via debt.
> Cryptocurrency, however, is literally invented out of thin air by programmers.
As opposed to being invented out of thin air by bankers. At least BTC is publicly auditable and verifiable.
> New cryptocurrencies are released every week. Even Bitcoin gets forked at times.
So what? You can start making PragmaticPulpDollars, how is that a problem for USD?
Particl doesn't thanks to MAD escrow - https://particl.wiki/learn/marketplace/mad-escrow/