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Brand loyalty is probably less important than network effects. NewTechCoin may be way better than Bitcoin but nobody's going to buy it until everyone else is buying it.

Well, that's what makes cryptocurrency a worthwhile market for speculation. Many folks look to the "market cap ranking" to see what's hot in the space, and going down the list and positioning yourself in a rank 400 coin - a good one that shows promise as a tech platform, a more efficient coin, a useful financial instrument or whatever - is one of the most straightforward ways to see 1000% returns, because even if it doesn't make it all the way up to the top 10, its valuation can grow faster than the market as a whole. (It can also get hit with huge drawdowns when the bear market hits. It's not all roses...)

While it is the case that most things get priced relative to BTC, and this does have a network effect since you end up exiting to BTC and thus reenforce its price, it's increasingly common to see trading pairs for ETH, LTC, USDC/USDT. There is interest in getting more liquidity into the market and that's a large part of "DeFi". It's not that BTC is self-perpetuating lock-in, it's that they're all growing but everything else is running several years behind, so on a day to day basis BTC still holds relatively more of the market.

Bitcoin is leading with a 50% market share. So big but not really a monopoly.

The question what will happen when Bitcoin flops. Will people trust other crypto? It looks like for the crypto train to keep on chugging, bitcoin needs to be sustained.

Right now it seems to be the main driver indeed. If the 'store of value' Bitcoin fails, I guess in the short term, all crypto's will crash. And then the question will be if one has a decent enough value proposition to rise up again. Although a lot of people are opinionated on this last part, the fact remains that none of us really knows.

Another option is of course that one crypto would just overtake Bitcoin. If I remember correctly this almost happend with Ethereum and was called the flippening. This scenario would be better for crypto of course than a real Bitcoin crash.

Reversibility is the feature of credit cards, not drawback or limitation.

Reversibility could probably be added on top via smart contract if someone wanted to provide the service, and people trusted the third party.

But you can't make a trustless exchange on top of a custodial framework.

Base layer has to be trustless / permissionless; all manner of third parties can build all kind of things on top of that.

But reverse isn't true - if base layer controlled by small number of third parties; nothing built on top can claw back that control.

Well, if there is such a thing as _the_ feature of credit cards, it's credit, as in deffered payment. Reversibility has its pros and cons. Similar to censorship and centralization. Until crypto, you didn't really have a technological means to prevent it, so it being popular in the fiat financial systems doesn't say anything.

Depends on who you are. For me the features of a credit card all revolve around convenience and risk minimization. Convenience in that I don't have to fumble around with bills and coins. Risk minimization in that US laws give me far more protection from fraudulent uses of my credit card than fraudulent uses of a debit card (and stolen cash is just gone for good).

Only once have I ever use the deferred payment aspect of a card, and that was a 0% APR offer.

While true on some level, this is broadly incorrect.

The necessity for reversibility, and the inflexibility of being limited either to it, or some form of it, is indicative of an inherent, unfixable flaw in the system itself.

This flaw limits the systems growth, adaptability, and usefulness.

I routinely buy things with fiat that complete in seconds. There's on order of trillions of completed fiat transactions per day. They don't generally take days. Only a tiny, tiny amount of them of a very limited class take days. It's disingenuous to imply all fiat transactions take that long.

Unless you’re paying cash, average final settlement time is ~90 days, in reality. That’s just been abstracted away from the credit card user. Bitcoin settles in 6 blocks (60 mins)

Now, on the UX topic, btc has a lot to improve. But I’m always surprised how rapidly people assume their transactions in fiat are settling as a comparative criticism for Bitcoin.

> Unless you’re paying cash, average final settlement time is ~90 days, in reality.

Do you have a source for that? I tried looking and everything I saw is it would take between 24 hours and 3 days on average, for credit cards.

You very well could be right, I'd just like to see something that confirms it, and wasn't able to find anything.

Example source: https://lifehacker.com/this-is-why-your-credit-card-transact...

One way to look at it is w/ credit cards, bill isn’t due until the end of the month (for a reason, and then all settlement starts occurring once you pay it). Would like a better source, I have that timeframe from an Anthony Pompliamo (VC in the space) interview by Lex Fridman, but I’m looking for a primary source as well.

On a per-value basis, what I have claimed is entirely true.

The bulk of fiat does not move around on peoples payment cards or in cash in their hands, it moves in bank-to-bank transfers that indeed do take days or even weeks, and further have an up to 10% failure rate.

It may well be that through the use of caveats you don't see or think about, you are able to execute small transactions quickly with fiat, but it is the counterparty to your transactions who is bearing the burden of fiats shortcomings in these cases.

For example, if we're comparing digitally, in most cases, you are able to arbitrarily reverse the transaction up to or even over a month later, claiming it as fraudulent, or rejecting it for some other reason justifiable to you, but for which the vendor has little recourse. This is the concept of "transaction finality", and with fiat it is very, very broken.

With cash a similar problem exists with counterfeit money, a vendor may collect up a weeks earnings, only to take them to the bank and have a percentage of them rejected.

All of these problems are solved by crypto, it improves on money in many key ways (these are just a couple), that's its point, and why people are excited about it enough to drive its collective value up to the region of Apple's stock value, around 4x faster than Apple took to do so.

> This is the concept of "transaction finality", and with fiat it is very, very broken.

Worked quite well for me when my credit card details were stolen and I could revert $8k of purchases immediately. If my wallet keys are stolen or cracked, I will lose everything with "transaction finality" - that would be a problem which is enabled not solved by crypto.

As we've seen with the development of centralised exchanges, institutional and retail custodial solutions, many of which are backed by various forms of insurance, the fact that the base layer provides for transactional finality (along with many other things), in no way prevents the development of custodial and insurance-backed solutions on top of it.

That crypto can do new things, and yet may also facilitate all of the (useful) old things, simply makes it a superior tool. There can be no fundamental argument against this.

With the big difference that you can evaluate transactions on current cards and halt future ones preventing damage. If you lose a wallet key, you lose all of it. The insurance solution for that would be extremely high compared to the current network.

Sure but it's trivial to split funds across accounts to mitigate that (even dynamically), unlike with cards where getting/activating a new one is a major hassle.

In theory yes. In practice: 1. those keys will be accessible from the same place/machine 2. people won't do it correctly or will ignore the issue. (if developers can't reliably manage PGP keys, general population balancing multiple wallets is just not happening)

Yes, these are concerns, but anything like this will not ultimately be left to consumers to deal with. As part of the process of crypto becoming widely-adopted, this class of problems is in the process of being solved in ways that are transparent to the user, and that will continue. The fact we are still speaking in terms of the base layer at all in terms of many projects, reveals the stage of development we are at.

It's a bit like worrying about how internet users will deal with IP packets that don't arrive, in the context of thinking about about how smooth an experience they're going to have surfing the web. It's not, and won't be, their problem to deal with.

The fact adoption has rushed ahead such that many multi-millions of users are faced with the base layer is analogous to if millions had rushed into using the internet when it was command-line only. Sure, if that had happened, many people would make mistakes and delete their drives or whatever - and this illustrates how wanted and overdue crypto is.

There are tremendous consequences of using this tech at the base layer incorrectly, but it doesn't appear to be dissuading adoption.

Your transaction isn't settled instantly. The actual money that flows between institutions behind the scenes is way slower than bitcoin. You can use credit/debit card on Bitcoin too, and your payments seem to go through instantly with whatever tps the network supports.

Your transaction isn't settled instantly. The actual money that flows between institutions behind the scenes is way slower than bitcoin.

... and yet the world turns; and credit cards amount to $3tn of payments in the U.S annually.

As it turns out, businesses do not actually care about instant settlement of payment transactions that much, what's important is instant authorization.

Bitcoin alone has done more than that per year since since 2018. And there are literally thousands of other projects.

Credit cards are small by comparison.

https://mobile.twitter.com/yassineARK/status/134613927863667...

That's absolutely an apples to hand grenades comparison.

First of all, global credit card volumes are much larger than Bitcoin volumes. Asia Pacific has been a bigger credit card market than the U.S. for some time - for example.

Secondly, credit cards payments are overwhelmingly payments for services or goods; effectively none of Bitcoin's total volume is in that category.

In fact, virtually all of Bitcoin volume is gross settlement and relates to speculative trading activity.

Bitcoin trading volumes are in the several trillions per day. I'm not referring to those.

On-chain transactions are for a variety of things, but they are all payments, which was the criteria in question you brought up.

Regardless of how you might opine on those payments "merit" (I could equally deride the usefulness of plastic trinkets ordered from China on Amazon - for what good it would do), they are not insignificant on Bitcoin compared to legacy systems. They are all payments settled either from one party to another, or between one party's multiple accounts, and just because they are almost entirely "only" settlements does not imply they are somehow not useful or otherwise to be derided.

>Bitcoin trading volumes are in the several trillions per day. I'm not referring to those.

Where does that number even come from? I've been trying to source anything that's even vaguely in the same ballpark and coming up empty. Most of the sources I can find suggest ~$100bn a day.

But no, in any case, that's not what I'm talking about either. Nor am I trying to apply any moral value to the purposes to which payments are put.

The point is: you can't say "credit cards are small relative to BTC" without consider the segmentation of the payment market in the fiat world.

I encourage you to provide evidence of the size of the "credit card" usage (i.e. goods and services payments) of BTC. Good data is hard to find but it's self-evidently not in the "trillions of USD per year" order-of-magnitude.

If you want to talk about the gross settlements segment, again, BTC is a minnow. Sure counting every transaction on the BTC blockchain, it's a few $tn a year currently. Fedwire does that much every day, and that's only for inter-institutional transfer.

You're probably missing the futures contracts.

You said "credit cards amount to $3tn of payments [my emphasis] in the U.S annually.", doing so as if this somehow made crypto appear small. I pointed out that Bitcoin alone does more than this per year in payments since 2018, and that there are thousands of other crypto projects. Many of these are also making comparable numbers of payments.

By the simple metric of how much value cryptocurrency users are transmitting with each other as payments, versus how much users of credit cards are doing - which was the original framing as I understood it - crypto wins. And of course it does, you may be right its an apples to hand grenades comparison, but the simple fact of the matter is we are comparing apples to hand grenades.

In some ways this is all about as useful as comparing how many miles horses and carts are doing versus steam or combustion engines.

The point is, even early on, per mile travelled, engines win. And they do so not just because they can travel further faster, but because they enable new use-cases by doing so - just like crypto.

Crypto has been here for ten years already and despite being derided as a toy early on, is now worth, and transferring, trillions.

See you after the next ten years, when credit cards will almost certainly be as VHS tapes are now.

Yeah and btc is instantly authd by the user. You sort of proved the other person’s point haha.

You just repeated my point. Are you trying to disagree with me or what?

There are no technical reasons keeping Bitcoin from achieving universal usage (50 daily transactions for each of 10 billion humans) while keeping fees low. This article has a great analysis of not just the technology but the economics and decentralization of the network: http://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks-...