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Comment by alex_suzuki | Hacker News Reader

You’d be hard-pressed to find a coffee shop around here that accepts ETH. I’m sure there’s a significant number of individuals that would know how to accept a crypto payment, but shops, small businesses, that have accounting requirements… I’m skeptical.

Disclaimer: I hold ETH.

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I too love remembering to file a 8949 for all my coffee purchases

Shopify has crypto-accepting methods of payments

Awesome. Now my coffee is available at a random cost. If I just forgo the coffee it's cloth in crypto tomorrow might be able to buy me a PS5. What a wonderful system!

When you pay with crypto you get a price in crypto and a time to pay it. Is not a random cost you know how much you have to pay

The dollar value of that crypto price is variable. Even if the price in crypto constantly updates, the cost to you in dollars is always in flux. For no discernible reason a cryptocoin can fluctuate in value.

Today one coin will buy a coffee while tomorrow one coin will buy a PS5. There's no incentive to transact with crypto if there's any assumption the value of that crypto will go up tomorrow.

For a seller they can get wiped out if they accepted payment for coffee in crypto and then the value of that coin tanks.

Knowing the crypto price is immaterial. You can never know what the value of the item will be. It's like paying for everything with lottery tickets.

Nevermind that most crypto systems are purposely deflating, because the whole point is to reward the people who were there first. So ANY purchase of coffee with crypto is self defeating. Your money is ALWAYS more valuable tomorrow. Actually smart people have known for a hundred years that's a stupid way to run an economy and people respond to it by hoarding and it basically eliminates economic activity from happening at all.

Any purchase of anything for any reason is self-defeating by this logic, due to the opportunity cost of forgoing investment.

Please educate yourself on a topic before pretending you know how it works.

Ethereum is deflationary ONLY if there's high economic activity. If there's lack of activity then it's inflationary. You can think of it as self regulated easing and tightening without the need for a central authority like the FED.

That said, you can also use a stablecoin to make payments.

Yeah there this this problem where sellers want to acquire appreciating money and buyers want to dispose of depreciating money. So, the goal is to somehow balance it out so that you have money that both seller and buyer want to use. The rule of thumb is 2% inflation. Of course you might argue that 0% inflation is better and -2% as a demurrage/negative interest is better because this means prices stay the same and savings are not devalued.

Haven’t you heard? According to my deep crypto friends, ETH is not meant for transactions. It’s the security and trust of ETH as an L1 that matters, and you should be using <random> L2 coin with ZK rollups instead!

Totally possible to move ETH on zkrollups.

L1 coins like ETH are natively compatible with L2s such as ZK-rollups. You don't need to use "L2 coins".

Eth isn't scalable (thus cheap) enough to work for a coffee shop transaction yet.

Transferring stablecoins is already a better experience than SWIFT though.

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