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Comment by vesinisa | Hacker News Reader

Yet, very rarely do we hear about cryptocurrency being used for anything but speculation and crime. In fact, those are the only two proven usecases for cryptocurrency. Money you can at least use to buy stuff, so it has a marked positive impact on the society.

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Speculation is a huge use case. Bitcoin will never be practical for day to day transactions but it may be for a settlement layer - certainly Ethereum is proving that out right now. A few minute settlement time is a huge advantage over what clearing houses offer. The immutability of the block chain somewhat less so, but if you introduce third party trust and can settle things off chain in case of a dispute, well, I for once do see a practical use of crypto beyond black market transactions and speculation.

Well, probably the settlement layer won't be BTC per se, but the incoming fork by the US government.

When your economy revolves around an entity armed to the teeth you don't need consensus.

Deflationary currencies encourage savings. The more the deflation the more the savings. Inflationary currency encourages consumerism. The more the inflation the more rapid spending. Each have their pluses and minuses.

The USD is an inflationary currency and Bitcoin is a deflationary currency. Right now Bitcoin is extremely deflationary and so there is extreme savings, but that is not sustainable indefinitely. Whether it becomes more popular to spend Bitcoin after the value levels out remains to be seen, but deflationary Bitcoin will always tend to encourage savings more than inflationary competitors like the USD.

I live in the US and saw a BitCoin ATM in a gas station just the other day. I asked the cashier about it and apparently they take BC payments too.

So, at least where I live, you can "buy stuff" with BC.

You'll be waiting on that gas station for hours for the payment to go through.

Not really. Your wait depends on the attached transaction fee and current network conditions. If you cheap out, then yes you have to wait, but it's also entirely avoidable.

The original Bitcoin continued as Bitcoin Cash. Very low transaction fees and always included in the next block. BCH ftw

Yes which now stands at $37 on average which is probably more than you what you bought at the gas station. Ethereum fees are very high too. There are other currencies that are better with this. But currently my credit card does this at a fee of ~3% instantly.

Part of the problem is that the seller pays that, and not you

The average transaction cost is baked into sticker prices, so at the end of the day, it's the buyer who pays the transaction costs. It's like saying 'the merchant pays rent' - yes, in a way, but really no. The customers pay the rent for the merchant via mark-ups.

However, there are a number of benefits; for one, average ticket size is about 20% higher for credit transactions vs cash (if I recall correctly) and merchants do not have to hold onto and manage piles of cash. This is a material cost savings.

Further, of that 3%, about 0.1% goes to Visa, the rest goes to the issuing bank and covers the cost of rewards programs and loan origination. Generally speaking between 1 and 2% of that will be rebated to the buyer.

For the remaining 0.9-1.9%, customers get benefits like insurance and the ability to issue chargebacks.

In Europe, debit interchange is capped at 0.2% and credit at 0.3%, and they just don't have insurance or rewards.

As it stands today if you wanted to transact in crypto, not only will you pay the $30 fee, you'll also be paying the mark-up for credit acceptance.

> As it stands today if you wanted to transact in crypto, not only will you pay the $30 fee,

Only bitcoin and ethereum have fees in this range. Other cryptocurrencies do not.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-eth...

Indeed, and thank you for sharing the link, I've been looking at crypto transaction fees one-off so it's nice to have them overlaid.

I know how credit cards work. I'm saying that Ethereum fees could be priced in the same way and you'd also never notice them because they'd get aggregated over every purchase. I realize this isn't a realistic scenario, but I think it's ignoring a monopoly type situation to accept that credit cards can price their costs in and other types of transactions cannot.

its "priced in"

I'm curious where the $37 number comes from? I just did a quick search and came up with $13.64 for a "high priority" transaction (higher than normal fee to get included in a block sooner)[0]. It's still high, but not $37 high.

[0] https://mempool.space/

I got that from here: https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

Of course the "average" might be more bytes than buying a pack of gum but the argument still holds that the transaction costs are prohibitive for general commerce.

Why would you need to wait for the transaction to confirm? That’s not how bitcoin payments work.

That's because cryptocurrencies are typically much better than conventional currencies for speculation and crime. Some "coins" are also usable as standard payment methods, but they're either on-par with conventional banking or just slightly better, not enough to make them the preferred choice for mundane transactions. The stigma also doesn't help.

These are a bit random. The church has many perceptions similar to this one.

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