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Comment by flatline | Hacker News Reader

Crypto moves the problem from payment providers like Visa to central exchanges like Coinbase. Until you have a completely decentralized ecosystem built around crypto, you run into trouble when offramping to fiat. If I recall, backpage accepted bitcoin when Visa dropped them, but it was way too much hassle to be useful. If you could pay rent and utilities and buy food using some sufficiently decentralized token, crypto may become a viable alternative.

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The principle should be that it shifts the problem to payment providers who can be switched out for other payment providers seamlessly. The providers are motivated to behave ethically because you have the option of going elsewhere.

Paying with crypto is still not very usable but you can still do it directly which limits the degree of extortion that can be applied. I think it will get better as it ceases to be 'interesting' and people develop tools that just work rather than try to revolutionize your life.

> If you could pay rent and utilities and buy food using some sufficiently decentralized token, crypto may become a viable alternative.

You can do all that today, although it requires some learning and setup, but at least in the US it's totally doable.

I know of Joel Valenzuela who is an evangelist about paying everything with decentralized cryptocurrencies:

https://descentr.net/

The interesting thing about cryptocurrencies is using them directly, i.e. when users have their own wallets under their full control. Then it's magical when you make a transaction to somebody and think that nobody is censoring, filtering, moderating or rejecting it in any way. Oh and no PII either.

Edit: typo.

There is no monopoly on exchanges, and by nature of the technology it is impossible to monopolize exchanges.

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