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Comment by jqpabc123 | Hacker News Reader

How many people have ever actually bought some physical real world product with crypto?

Even among crypto fans, I suspect the answer is a very small minority.

As an actual currency, crypto has yet to get out of the starting gate. Any popularity it has is mostly among those who don't know much about monetary policy and for the most part, really don't care. Any crypto "culture" is built around myth and imagination of what might be but has never been.

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I hold Monero since it's popular on darknet marketplaces.

With the global drug trade estimated at ~$8 trillion, if XMR captures 1% of that it's ~$80B.

XMR is currently valued at ~$4.3B so I'd be looking at 18.6x ROI

But I don't think this is the utopia use-case that crypto proponents support

Whenever I hear someone say “if X captures 1% of the market, that’s $Y Billion” I can’t help but feel like that’s backwards: If X captured $Y Billion of revenue then it’ll have 1% marketshare. Capturing 1% marketshare is not equally easy in all markets, it’s much harder to capture 1% of a very large market. There’s no hard-and-fast rule that “surely anyone working hard enough will get at least 1% marketshare”.

I agree with you.

It's so easy! I'll just capture 1% of global GDP and make $847B/yr

I think my thesis is directionally correct (I do hold XMR broadly for the reasons stated)

But the spirit of the post was to be ridiculous

Drugs is the answer you are seeking.

LSD, Ketamine, 2CB and MDMA. It’s cryptos only use for me personally.

I've long felt that cryptocoins real promise to sellers is the lack of chargebacks / fraud. Once you've received the money, you've received the money.

For a bunch of coins the high transaction fees make it pretty pointless (why pay 20$ worth of BTC for a 5$ exchange). But something like monero's with ~0.0007$ fees [1] (which the buyer pays anyways) should be attractive to a seller.

[1]: https://www.monero.how/monero-transaction-fees

One of my old pals bought lots of drugs on the dark web over the course of 5 years, nearly a decade ago. They estimate that if they would have held that bitcoin instead of it (quite literally) going up in smoke, it would be worth nearly 5 million USD today. But that's the only real world transaction that comes to mind, buying illegal stuff (which is now legal where we live). Normal people don't pay for a coffee with cryptocurrency because it's not convenient, not fast, and and not "easy".

There were well over 30k attendees at the Miami Bitcoin 2022 Conference last week. Every single vendor accepted Bitcoin payments over the Lightning Network. Many local shops and restaurants in Miami Beach also accept Bitcoin.

I purchased multiple coffees and meals using BTC/LN, with zero issues and the payments were processed faster than a credit card.

In addition to physical goods, some prominent online services have been accepting Bitcoin for a while, such as Namecheap (dns registrar) and Mullvad (vpn).

It is quite the opposite. It is pouplar among thoes who __know a lot__ about monetary policy and they want to get __out__ from the fraud that our current global regime is. As for "has yet to get out of the starting gate": you have to get your head out of the sand instead. It is already mainstream and it is already being adopted by huge companies including JPMorgan, KPMG and a lot of others and also by countries like El Salvador.

Ukraine's military is using it.

> “In a situation like this, where the national bank is not fully operating, crypto is helping to perform fast transfers, to make it very quick and get results almost immediately,”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/technology/bitcoin-ukrain...

I have, I bought some jewellery for around $100 worth of crypto. Admittedly, that was before crypto culture really became what it is now - probably 2014 or so. I've distanced myself from it all now, but it was reasonably easy to buy real products back then. I'd be surprised if it wasn't easier now, assuming transaction fees aren't absurdly high.

https://app.ribbon.finance/v2/theta-vault/T-yvUSDC-P-ETH

This is an automated put-selling strategy using stablecoins (USDC). Every week the smart contract picks a new strike based on the Black Scholes formula and sells puts for the ETH price.

This is just one use case for one project in the DeFi space. It has $115 million deposited which is a small amount of the total put to work in DeFi.

Crypto doesn’t need to be a currency - crypto is permissionless finance. There are thousands of projects like the one I linked. HN commenters generally have no idea what’s going on in this space and continue to argue “bUt iS iT a CuRrEnCy???” talking points as if anyone gives a fuck who works or invests in the ecosystem.

People implemented automated trading strategies decades before Blockchain or "smart contracts" existed.

Key word is “permissionless” - anyone on earth can create more projects and anyone on earth can invest. No license, government, or agreement needed.

What does permissionless even mean in the context of an automated trading strategy? Ultimately, someone needs to put up the initial capital, meet marginal calls when required, and cover losses when they happen. What happens when your smart contract goes to initiate a sell and there are no buyers (a real possibility in any market but especially illiquid crypto markets)? Exchanges exist for a reason.

Everything is building blocks. For the project I linked it’s fully collateralized - you can’t withdraw money that would make the system unstable. Other projects build on other pieces of infrastructure to do all of that automatically.

Again it seems like the person I’m talking to understands very little about this space because your questions are rudimentary to anyone who understands crypto, but you comment as if you are an authority. This is the central problem with HN and crypto conversations.

Actually, the central problem with crypto advocates is that they start from the position of assuming everyone around them is an idiot and then set about building replacements for all sorts of things (banks, currencies, exchanges, legal dispute resolution mechanisms, supply chain management, databases, etc.) that they themselves do not understand and end up with fragile, inferior substitutes that never get any traction for good reason.

Clearly I am indeed speaking with someone who has no idea what they are talking about, which as I previously stated is the default HN crypto commenter.

> assuming everyone around them is an idiot

Or just subservient to a corrupted system.

In this context it means: -system is built with bearer-style assets in mind to handle liquidations without having a 'negative' balance (so instead of a margin call, onus is on the user to track prices and refill liquidity, otherwise the system liquidates the position to pay back the other market participants involved) - Anyone can put money in this - the smart contracts use other automated markets like AMMs (think of it like a two-way vending machine between Twix and M&M's, where one can set the price between two assets based on how many units of Twix and M&M's they put in initially, and people can trade into and out of them by putting one in, and getting the other. The people who put in both provide liquidity, and they get a portion of the trading fees. These two-way vending machines are set up so that if someone puts a ratio of Twix/M&M's in their vending machine that doesn't match the market price, someone can just arbitrage that out so that the price matches the market. It's like finding the cheapest place to get food

Among my peers, we learned about cryptocurrency back when it was the best/only way to buy MDMA off the Silk Road.

Does 100% living off of crypto count as 'actual' to you? Plenty of people in that boat.

The fact that someone doesn't want to pay an extra $3 and wait 15 minutes to buy a coke is really a poor basis for reasoning.

Is TSLA also not "actually" valuable? You have to sell it for it to do anything too.

From before the Bitcoin whitepaper, the goal has been to decouple value from arbitrary, inflationary, corporate and state-imposed forces. It was referred to as egold not ePayPal.

EDIT: literally asking for crypto perspective then downvoting when it's provided. This is why no one responds positively on HN crypto threads. Too much head in the sand with karma.

Yikes. There's a lot to unpack here.

> Does 100% living off of crypto count as 'actual' to you? Plenty of people in that boat.

Who? Lol. The overwhelming majority of people do not "live off of crypto".

> The fact that someone doesn't want to pay an extra $3 and wait 15 minutes to buy a coke is really a poor basis for reasoning.

No it isn't. If I go to CVS to buy a Coke I don't want to be there for fifteen minutes. I want to be there for a few seconds at most.

> Is TSLA also not "actually" valuable? You have to sell it for it to do anything too.

Yeah but it's unlikely people are _living off of it_ or trying to convince other people that if they get in, then they too can live off of it.

> From before the Bitcoin whitepaper, the goal has been to decouple value from arbitrary, inflationary, corporate and state-imposed forces. It was referred to as egold not ePayPal.

Yes, we know why Bitcoin exists. We also know why _it doesn't work_. The power of the State dictates the power of the currency.

Within the next year you will literally be able to go to CVS and buy whatever you want via Lightning Network and it’ll be nearly instant. An actual completed transaction too, not something that doesn’t settle until later.

I just don't care that much really. The current systems work fine IMO.

They work fine but they’re relatively expensive. 3% of the total cost of a transaction can be a double digit percentage of the profit margin of a sale. Then there’s the risk of chargebacks etc adding more cost on top of that.

I'm sure tons of fallible things work in your experience.

>If I go to CVS to buy a Coke I don't want to be there for fifteen minutes.

Nor do you want to pay a transaction fee that is twice the value of the item you are purchasing.

Do you really believe most crypto fans are just holding and doing nothing else? Especially after earning 10x 100x 1000x in dollars? I have convinced several ppl to buy crypto pretty early but nobody of them kept holding after earning several times more they have bought.

OP said literally nothing about buying and holding, so you’re starting off with a straw man.

How many of those people have used crypto to purchase any goods?

Can VPN be considered as goods?

It would classified a service, not goods. But feels a bit pedantic in this context.

nobody of them kept holding after earning several times more they have bought.

No? So did they spend it ... or did they exchange it into something that is actually a working currency?

> actually a working currency

Isn't "working currency" a "physical real world product"?

No.

How a nice-smelling crunching-sound cash might be not a physical and not a product?

You crooks know that there are some taxing problems in some parts of the world if seller wants crypto instead of national currency.

Sick of arrogant & condescending comments like this made by ignorant people. You're flexing because you took advantage of a bubble, congratulations, nobody cares, and it's completely irrelevant to the parents comment.

I was maybe condescending but in what place I was arrogant?

And who seems more ignorant - dollars & bitcoins user or only dollars user?

> nobody cares

Except of you?

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