Crypto as an investment - Not your keys, not your coin.
Crypto as a currency - I can't directly buy food, water, shelter, transportation, energy, or anything fundamental with it.
I know acceptance is growing, but 10+ years later, crypto still has extremely limited acceptance for daily goods and services. It is almost exclusively held as an investment.
We're getting there and you can already use our product at 50k+ stores in the US.
Even in this market, merchants are still interested. We launched new ones this week.
Comparing us to Visa or Paypal we are rinky dinky af, no denying that. But we are definitely growing.
Your lens of investment vs currency is also very US based. Consider countries that frequently experience huge rates of inflation. Non-fiat money can be valuable for them.
There's a lot of interest in taking crypto payments mainstream, but large, established institutions are unwilling to expose themselves to the regulatory risk they would take on by building this stuff.
A lot of these folks express extreme skepticism in the media, but are super willing to talk/partner in private.
Which makes sense considering its volatility. Why would I make transactions with a unit of currency that sees hundreds of percentage change over just a few years?
And as others say, there is no real value to it other than speculation. This gets argued to death, but it's true. At least fiat has stability, and the USD is used to settle basically all energy (and most commodity) transactions. Do people actually expect the commodity market to be settled with crypto in the future?
Why wouldn't I? If I'm going to hold bitcoin for five minutes, what do I care how its price changes over years?
The problem with bitcoin is that the technology is shit, and sucks for transactions, unless the world is prepared to only do like 50 transactions a minute.
Goods go through supply chains. Multiple transactions occur over a period of time in order to create a final good.
Service industries need to supply themselves with various goods in order to provide their services. The cost of those goods are used to price their services. When there is huge volatility through these processes, things fall apart.
Cryptocurrency payments is a flourishing market, btw.
Not surprising, considering the technology isn't there yet. Scalability (and thus fees) are still unsolved. UX has so much to improve as well.
It's advancing, but it takes time.
It is a speculative vehicle.