Comment by rcxdude | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcxdude | Hacker News Reader

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It's a good example of how cryptos have managed to get an absolutely terrible reputation amongst potential users, even the users worst served by the current financial system. It's not entirely undeserved: the sheer quantity of grift and hubris in the crypto ecosystem is absolutely harming it, and I don't blame someone for not wanting anything to do with it, even if it would solve problems for them. The same happened even more with NFTs: they were supposedly aimed directly at artists and yet because the first most artists heard of them was other people ripping off their art to sell at inflated prices because of the hype cycle (and the most valuable NFTs being shitty paper doll generic art) it 100% backfired and now most of the artist community absolutely hates NFTs and anything to do with them (this poll happened at the peak of that, as well). If you manage to make most of your potential users despise you and your product then something is seriously wrong.

> even if it would solve problems for them.

It wouldn't. At the end of the day you need to pay for stuff in your life: food, rent, clothes. None of those things are paid in crypto. All of them are paid in actual real money.

When the price of crypto can go up and down hundreds of percents per day this makes it a very bad substitute for money.

The price of BitCoin doesn't "go up and down hundreds of percents per day".

Even a 20% fluctuation would make it unviable for a person who needs to make long-term planning like, you know, paying rent and buying food.

Last week alone bitcoin price fluctuation was ~8%. Last month? 146%

146%?

Any source on that? It would need to go from 20K to 50K.

My bad. It looks like I misclicked on some graph here: https://www.coindesk.com/price/bitcoin/

But we could take past year as a whole. Fluctuations from 47k to 16.4k (3 times drop) then 27k (1.6 rise, still 1.7 below the high). There are drops that go to a price 1.5 lower in just a week. Imagine you need to pay rent on that week.

Turns out you can easily convert many cryptocurrencies into "real money" to pay for things like food and rent.

Several countries classify cryptocurrency as property subject to capital gains tax, making it more complicated than cash for ordinary uses like buying goods and services.

Sounds like a problem with the tax regime rather than with cryptocurrency.

If you wave away any reality then no problem is with cryptocurrency.

And yet, for some reason reality exists and intervenes every single time.

You can use USDC or any number of other stablecoins. You don't ever have to touch a volatile asset if you don't want to.

Food, clothes and all the other stuff can be paid with crypto. Rent is probably harder, but I guess when you live in a place like Dubai that also won't be a problem (houses are sold/bought with crypto there).

If you want you can also get paid in crypto, so it's not as hard as you might think.

> Food, clothes and all the other stuff can be paid with crypto.

Of course they can't

> Rent is probably harder, but I guess when you live in a place like Dubai that also won't be a problem

Ah yes. The solution to everyone's rent problems with crypto: just move to Dubai.

> If you want you can also get paid in crypto, so it's not as hard as you might think.

There are over 200 000 creators on Patreon. I'll let you guess how many of those live in Dubai

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