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Comment by 0x62 | Hacker News Reader

HN has always been quite anti-crypto, but I'd like to pose a counter argument. I run a remote services-based organisation in a related industry, and we switched to 100% crypto payments across the business.

It's massively simplified our processes, and improved UX. Our customer base is already crypto-native, which is what makes this possible.

Users pay us simply by sending funds to our wallet. Our entire payment processing engine is under 300 lines, including USD-denominated fees in crypto. Payments arrive instantly, with almost zero fees, from any country.

We have no chargebacks or (traditional) payment fraud.

Our remote staff are paid in crypto, arriving instantly with no cross-border issues.

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The cognitive dissonance here is amazing. Here is an actual application of crypto that is downvoted, while empty talking points around how crypto has zero use cases are always the top comments.

What is the service that you are providing? Because whatever field I am in, being unable to provide a customer a refund is a large no-no.

The irreversibility of payments in nearly all crypto systems does NOT prevent providing a refund to a customer. That can always be done by making a new payment to the customer.

One might argue that crypto makes customers unable to demand a refund, or that it is impossible to send a refund to a customer who is so anonymous that the merchant cannot even communicate with them, but these are less obviously a "no-no" for a business.

Software development and consulting. None of this prevents us issuing refunds, we can simply reverse a payment by sending the funds back.

> HN has always been quite anti-crypto

Not even a bit. The tide has changed after endless failures on the side of cryptocurrencies.

> Our customer base is already crypto-native, which is what makes this possible.

You've said it yourself. If the only way to accept crypto payments is to have a "crypto-native" userbase, what does this say about its utility for society? If the entire crypto industry is self referential, then once you peel back the layers there's not much left but a big system that moves money around in a circle.

>a big system that moves money around in a circle.

Aren't you describing all fiat currencies? How is the US dollar any different?

none of those details justify egregious waste of power

YouTube used over 175 times more energy watching Gangnam Style in 2019 than Ethereum uses per year. Paypal uses 100x the power consumed by PoS Ethereum in a year [0].

This argument was (and still is) valid for PoW algorithms, but energy consumption is now barely a factor for Ethereum, which is the main network we take payments on [1].

[0] https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/

[1] https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption

I am not opposed to proof of stake but your arguments that youtube and paypal are more wasteful isn't super convincing- after all, you picked a video that's been watched billions of times, and paypal provides a very important service.

My argument isn't that Paypal is more wasteful necessarily, it's more pointing out the inconsistencies in how value vs sustainability is weighed up.

Ethereum is currently doing 30 TPS [0], and Paypal ~200 [1]. Assuming that energy usage scales linearly (a naive assumption, but for arguments sake), it could deliver similar value with 10x lower energy consumption, I don't find arguing against the adoption of PoS crypto solely based on sustainability very credible either.

[0] https://ethtps.info/

[1] https://www.ing.uc.cl/en/boletines/engineering-student-scale....

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