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Comment by brainchild-adam | Hacker News Reader

I am both fascinated and confused by crypto currencies.

The idea of a free-as-in-freedom, flexible, secure, and more democratic and independent payment system seems quite attractive.

At the same time I seem to see mainly examples of high-to-extreme volatility, fraud, technical and regulatory exclusion and suppression, and a total lack of real-world practicality.

I am quite sure my view is skewed.

If you have used crypto currencies in real life, ideally for more than speculative investment, would you be willing to share (parts of) the experience? I'd be very curious to learn more about this part of the puzzle of crypto.

How did you acquire crypto? What did you use it for? How did you feel about the transaction? Would you do it again?

Or anything else you'd like to share for that matter.

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I had one customer ever want to pay for some hobbyist electronics kit using BTC. He worked for...a startup doing cryptocurrency processing :P

Transaction went fine, I cashed out through Coinbase, didn't sit on it too long. It was not inconvenient. This was before BTC hashing efforts were consuming nation-state levels of electricity. I'd probably decline nowadays based on that alone.

Thanks for sharing.

> If you have used crypto currencies in real life, ideally for more than speculative investment, would you be willing to share (parts of) the experience? I'd be very curious to learn more about this part of the puzzle of crypto.

> How did you acquire crypto? What did you use it for? How did you feel about the transaction? Would you do it again?

i got some Bitcoin back in 2012-2013 when people would operate faucets. i realized most of those faucets worked by displaying ads and just giving users a cut of the ad revenue. i spun up my own faucet on the same principle and made a bit of $BTC that way. since the ads only pay for human impressions, i gated the faucet behind a captcha, but i got clever and wired that to an API where the captchas i showed my visitors were actually sourced from 3rd parties who wanted their own submitted captchas to be solved by a human and were willing to pay $ for that.

i killed the whole thing a month later once i properly confronted the fact that i was enabling bulk spammers by doing this.

since then, i’ve used crypto to purchase VPNs, shared data replication (i.e. i want to backup 1 TB of data offsite, and also i have 2 TB of free HDD capacity: i’ll back up your data if you & a someone else backup my data), and the occasional donation to charity or “content creators”. i used Sia/Siacoin for the storage bit, but the UX was a little weak and i’ve just gone back to Backblaze in the meantime — will revisit the area at some future point. as for the donations bit: it’s nice to be able to donate to a project anonymously so that it doesn’t impact my relationship with the devs/artist/etc. even “independent” media outlets are in a weird place where the desire to keep advertisers causes a bit of self-censorship, but the authors don’t want to paywall their work because that limits their audience; sponsorship (Patreon style) plays a role here, and enough people have been bitten by Paypal/Patreon/others that things like Bitcoin have a small foothold.

i’ve also used cryptocurrencies to purchase medications before getting an official diagnosis, and then take these findings to my GP or a specialist and get proper prescriptions for whatever treatment worked best. it’s generally faster and a bit more intuitive than working through the official healthcare system from start to finish, and people have so far been surprisingly receptive when i list my symptoms and then say “by the way i’ve tried medications X/Y/Z and had the following experiences with them: …”. make of that what you will.

Thank you for the detailed account.

Have you used fiat to buy crypto as well, or do you still use the original crypto from when you started?

I can see how in theory crypto could be interesting in the creator space as touched on by you. Do you think Stripe's implementation could facilitate this?

As to medication: sorry to hear you had to go that route, but it totally makes sense to me. Glad to hear it's been working out for you. Yay for crypto in this case!

> Have you used fiat to buy crypto as well, or do you still use the original crypto from when you started?

oh, yeah i’ve used exchanges before. even in that bitcoin-powered “business” i described, it wasn’t closed: a bitcoin faucet drains BTC, while ads (at the time?) pay in $USD, so i had weekly USD -> BTC exchanges on a centralized exchange (i forget the name of the exchange).

sadly, i didn’t keep any of that Bitcoin. i was away from the space during the major bullruns — came back to it only in the last few years once i entered the workforce and wanted a place to store savings. i couldn’t make sense of the banking and investment systems (Fidelity, Vanguard): what happens if they lose customer balances due to datacenter fire/hacks/etc? what controls do they have in place to prevent that? at the time i just stashed my $ in BTC because it was the only place where i felt i understood the security model.

yeah, onramps help. several of the commercial transactions i’ve made with BTC have been through bitpay’s embeddable web widget. Stripe’s thing seems like the next evolution of that. it likely won’t alone cure the issue of creators who get kicked from payment platforms today (Stripe could kick them off just as well as Paypal/Patreon/et al), but it may pave the way toward future iterations that better solve that — just by getting more users familiar with cryptocurrency transaction flows. we’ll see :-) do you have any predictions?

Thank you for elaborating. What you describe ads balance to my impression of the crypto world, and like that.

> at the time i just stashed my $ in BTC because it was the only place where i felt i understood the security model.

Makes perfect sense to me. It was something you could wrap your head around more easily.

I also like how you frame onramps, and how you talk about an iterative process.

Curious to see where it all will go.

As to my predictions, I am afraid I am a little pessimistic here.

I obviously know very little about crypto, so I cannot take those unknows into account.

What I do expect in a way is anything that threatens established power, be it monetary or political, to be treated as such: a threat. The more unregulated crypto is perceived as such, the more blowback I would expect. The more it gets regulated, the less useful in solving actual problems it might become, since it might simply become another expression of what now are our regulated currencies.

Does that make sense? Any thoughts?

These ideas are all technological in nature and avoid thinking about what payment systems are: they're social constructs, not technological ones.

The problem with crypto-as-payment network is that their central appeal is that they bypass all of the regulatory frameworks that protect every day people from money laundering and fraud; bypass sanctions, etc.

As soon as they're subjected to the same regulation and oversight that other payment networks and money transmitters are... there's no point. As a network technology it's slow, inefficient, difficult to develop on and extend. And any organization set up to follow regulations that exist today would have to have reserves, charters, submit themselves to regular inspections, etc and... be exactly what we already have.

Some people think by-passing international wire rails (SWIFT etc) is the big win: I can send money to friends/family in the global south without the fees/sanctions associated with such transfers in the regulated system. I would like to see that become a better experience for people in general but I don't think crypto and bypassing the state is the answer here. It's way more risky for a lot of reasons.

crypto-to-crypto is low volatility. Seen from the other side of the hole, it's USD that's volatile.

Genuinely curious:

(a) Shouldn't the USD then be comparatively volatile relative to goods and services as well?

(b) With the USD (in this case) the de-facto currency for practically all end use cases compared to crypto (ppl need to cash out eventually for practically everything), doesn't this mean that for all practical purposes it's the crypto that's volatile, since it determines the eventual real-life value in USD?

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