Since when have you been waiting? What will you do in twenty years if it hasn't burst by then? And in forty? Continue to wait?
It has less regulation than the official channels. Can have better privacy. Can be cheaper. Can be faster. Compared to Western Union, international wire transfers and the likes, sending money home for foreign workers (remittance), seems to be much better with Stellar, or other low-fee crypto currencies.
Maybe one more problem that it solves: I bought some crypto early on as a hedge against global politics going to shit (US, Russia or China going into proxy wars) or economics taking a dive (and governments/central banks deciding to devaluate, ...).
I totally agree with you on NFT's though. And I don't like the speculation/gambling aspect of crypto currencies.
Bank payment from Spain to Poland is cheaper than cryptocurrency; bank payment from Nigeria to Peru is likely to be more expensive than cryptocurrency; and a bank payment from USA to Iran is effectively impossible while cryptocurrency can work.
Go find out what the actual numbers are, then make the argument. Wishful thinking gets you nowhere.
You'll send $1000 from your Nigerian bank to the Peruvian bank, $937.65 will arrive after a week+. Most likely nobody will be able to explain where the money went.
It's just almost impossible to know the answer to the fee question beyond "probably a lot"
An bank payment from Nigeria to Peru might reasonably cost $20-$100, and I wouldn't be that surprised if in a particular situation it would come out to $10 or $300 (like, making a typo in some field of a non-validated foreign payment, or having an unclear tax situation on the goods for which the payment is held - that can easily cause e.g. a $100 extra unexpected processing fee for the payment). Also, you may get amount-proportional fees, and a 0.5% fee can potentially be huge for larger payments. On the other hand of the comparison there is also significant variability for the extra costs of the cryptocurrency payment - as the original question stated, including the cost and exchange rate variation of buying crypto for fiat in the sending country and selling crypto in the receiving country.
So it's likely but not certain that it's more expensive than an equivalent crypto payment + the to-crypto and from-crypto conversion, it depends on unknowable circumstances, and the variability and unpredictability of such fees is a big drawback on those types of international payments - unlike e.g. the intra-EU case where the fees would be predictable and low - perhaps zero, depending on your bank.
Additionally, a hedge is only as good as its performance in case of a worst-case scenario. If the stock market takes a dive or war breaks out, crypto will dive just as hard - same as it had done in the past.
When Greece was freezing / slowing bank withdrawals during its financial crisis in 2015, BTC price climbed.
IIRC BTC also jumped when Russia was getting involved in Ukraine in 2014.
It's not a perfect hedge, but I do believe bitcoin could be valuable if the world/governments go (partly) to shit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012–2013_Cypriot_financial_cr...
[1] https://money.cnn.com/2013/03/28/investing/bitcoin-cyprus/in...
Genuinely asking as a newbie to this kind of thing, what's the advantage of using crypto over assets more traditionally used for this purpose such as gold?
I don't think it has much use other than speculation either, but it does have advantages over gold.
In a stable, law-abiding society these advantages are a bit pointless, but enough people either see the future as unstable and lawless, or currently live in unstable and lawless places, that there is market demand for crypto as a store of value.
I don't own any gold because I'd be worried about securing it. While I do have some valuables in my house, most of it is easily replaceable.
Less regulation -> more crime.
Better privacy -> more crime.
Cheaper -> more unstable currency markets.
Faster -> more unstable currency markets.
There is a balance to be found, but at the moment most cryptocurrencies are a nightmare from the perspective of people who value stability and order in social arrangements. And none of the current players seem particularly interested in finding that balance, because they know very well that most of their customers are interested in keeping it wild.
Bitcoin is permissionless money. You might not value that, but others do.
Bitcoin is indeed permissionless, which means you can use it for things society might find nefarious: tax evasion, drug trade, uncontrolled arms trade, human trafficking, money laundering, etc etc. You might not value that, but society as a whole does.
If the way it "solves the problem" is by not following the regulations that everybody else has to follow, I don't know if it's actually solving a problem so much as cheating the system.
NFT's like offered by NBA Topshots (basically replacing physical collectibles in a digital form factor) have their appeal if your into collecting sports stuff). 20 pixel unicorns for 1 ETH? Not so much..
And less regulation means more crime - the only reason the ransomware epidemic exists is cryptocurrency. Remittance is also not actually cheaper with cryptocurrency if you actually count all the fees, but most likely more expensive than Western Union.
Cryptocurrency delivers none of what it promises. It only delivers crime and ecological destruction.
I also tried not to pass judgement. I understand that less regulation leads to more crime (and I think we are seeing evidence of that). What I'm trying to say is that this solves a problem for people who want less regulation.
With respect to simplicity and fees; If I want to send money to a family member in Botswana, I can do that in about a minute with something like Stellar. The transaction fees are negligible (<1 cent). Converting to fiat to actually use it, does carry some fees (roughly 2 x 0.1% on Binance). I couldn't get an exact quote from Western Union, but I remember it being a lot more expensive and a lot more hassle (granted, it's been over a decade since I last used them)
Withdrawing to GBP is only £0.5.
The volatility of cryptocurrency prices alone makes them a pretty bad fit for any transaction whose value needs to be agreed upon within reasonable limits.
For stuff like blackmail, where profit margins are high and payments are highly negotiable, the benefits of anonymity outweigh this drawback, but for most honest business, it matters to a recipient whether they get $100k or $75k.
> economics taking a dive
And your bet is that when society collapses, the power grid and the internet will keep operating to keep cryptocurrencies cranking on. Not sure that is a safe bet.
The (tiny) investment I keep in crypto is a hedge when economies tank, or governments/central banks intervene. Eg, when bank withdrawals were frozen/slowed in Greece 2015, or when bank balances over 100K were seized in Cyprus 2013.
The whole point of these systems is to be permissionless and censorship-resistant. Simple yard stick: If your proposed alternate "distributed system" is harder to use successfully for extorting ransomware payments, then it does not do the same work, and it does not do it better.
Start thinking of crypto as luxury goods, then a lot of what happens (has happened) makes sense. It started out with practical problems it was trying to solve, but clearly morphed into something else entirely.
It’s hard to know what happens when the hype dies. I don’t suspect cryptocurrency will cease to exist, but for the good of cryptocurrency’s long term future, you might hope for such a bubble burst, too.