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Comment by tiberius_p | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it...cryptocurrencies were meant to facilitate the transfer of money not to make people rich. Use it for what it's meant to be used - to make payments. Generate a wallet using python, deposit a small amount of cash at the nearest crypto ATM and use it like a normal bank account. And make small payments because it's volatile and your money might get lost on the way to its destination.

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It’s been 15 years and they’ve cycled through quite a few alleged usecases without ever arriving at one that’s convincing.

But the incentives are in place to keep the search going for quite a long time, even if it’s mostly aimed at unlocking supplies of greater fools.

It took paper money hundreds of years before a use case was found. 15 years is very short for a new technology. I suspect that the generation that comes of age after its creation will find a use. My guess is that after 2028 we will start to see the true use cases. In any case, they are not going away.

One case that's happening now, which is very useful, is the burning of stray methane to create bitcoins. Companies are creating bitcoin rigs that can be placed near wellheads that are spewing methane into the environment since there is no profitable way to stop it or use the fuel. Bitcoin is the way to use the fuel that's being released into the atmosphere.

> were meant to ...

Many inventions "were meant to" to do one thing, but wound up doing something else far more valuable.

The value of a tool has little to do with the original intent of its inventor.

The big issue is that these "currencies" are treated as assets. People accumulate them in hopes of them going up. They need to have an expiration associated with the coin so it becomes a currency for payments, not an asset to accumulate. Something like an expiration date of 6 months after you receive them. People will need to use them or lose them. I would propose that they have a shorter expiration time during recessions and longer during expansions.

With stable coins and ethereum l2 like arbitum having broad support to transfer them, the payment experience isn't all that different from something like zelle.

Stablecoins and L2 chains have the problem of being unregulated and usually centralized, though. At least L1 chains are fairly transparent and usually Open Source; sending your money over an L2 bridge is a game of trust. Stablecoins struggle in much the same way to lower volatility.

Monerium/EURe fully complies with EU e-money regulations. There's lots of similar products coming out in EU land, and more and more globally (e.g. euroe.com)

Most regulations apply to financial institutions, if your blockchain is provably decentralized (as in, nobody can rug/fraud you from your money), then a lot of regulations do not apply.

sure they were meant for that and it'd be neat if people ignored the possible upside of hoarding/hodling, but the economics satoshi chose made it inevitable that the coins would start worthless and become 10e9x more valuable as they were adopted by a global economy. You would be a fool to spend. basic marshmallow test.

> And make small payments because it's volatile

Why would anyone accept payments in this if it's volatile?

They accept payments in a USD/EUR or other FIAT pegged token, such as USDC, USDT, EURe, etc.

They already do that by eliminating the middle step and accepting in USD, EUR etc.

So why would you want to have a volatile currency to make small payments to people who don't accept it?

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