Beyond huge for the diaspora sending money back home. Bitcoin's volatility is a problem, but widespread adoption (or adding a stablecoin/altcoin) would mitigate that issue.
Also, is the claim about fees really true? If you look at Strike's FAQ on fees it says it passes all on-chain fees (and lightning fees) through to the user.
Essentially I'm very sceptical at the moment simply because I don't understand what it is about Strike that is saving you anything.
It will (hopefully) provide an easy UX for normies to send funds. Not adding functionality but removing friction.
The process was like "I send $10 of btc here, and it turns up here" but not "I deposited $72 bucks into my account to purchase btc through strike here, which bought $65 worht of bitcoin, which was worth $120 by the time I opened the twitter app and sent the $10 worth of btc, which was worth $9.80 when it arrived and then the guy who received it in his wallet went to withdraw in USD at one of the new cash points by which point the currency had fluctuated again and it was worth $5"
What I didn't see, though, was how he got that $10 on to the platform in the first place. Is that explained somewhere else? Moving money from one account to another on the same platform is rarely an issue, the real challenge is moving it between companies/custodians.
So, what LINE/Naver has been providing since 2014, except it's not using real money and thus adding one more level of friction?
Think I'll stick to LINE, thanks.
Gave up after first attempt: https://breez.technology/
Leads to empty TestFlight
https://bitcoin.strike.me/download
"Cannot Connect to the App Store"
But since Western Union only has a market cap of 8 B $, i guess the value of crypto is firmly overestimated.
There is an extremely large audience within the crypto space that uses stablecoins (as you mentioned) and treats the base currency as inventory to be used as fuel to process transactions. It is currently a $100bn market with high daily volume. Our entire society is familiar with volatile prices of fuel and we don't transact directly in it.
It is strange to me that - 12 years into this - people are still leaning on the base units as being the payment method itself and worried about how the volatility could work in economic theory.
Its not an argument. If you want it to be an argument, then add the theoretical hedging capabilities with some kind of micro-futures contract that neutralizes volatility for the user. Merchants already hedge or autoliquidate via their own crypto payment processor. But volatility as an issue is simply not an argument. The technology is waaaaay past that.
The zenith of the base unit's scarcity and use comes from the small fractions of it used in each layer1 transaction.