Really? at first I was hoping bitcoin would replace my atm card, then the value was too unstable and you had to convert as soon as you got it. Then we got about 900 other coins and I thought one of them could be the next electronic currency, like a coin that has value but has something like teather so that you dont have to play stock market everytime someone puts money in your account.
So its 2022 and which coin won? Cashapp. Really, thats what all the kids use that sell weed in the city, how you send a few bucks to a friend, or now cash app is like a Bank, checking and ATM card for a lot of young and poor people who cant get bank accounts or dont mind paying $5.00 to to withdraw 10$ (plus probably and ATM fee too, its crazy).
I dont even think crypto could get into the market with the huge hold that cash app has now. Its a shame.
Anyways I just remembered I have a binance account with some ETH or BTC, its got something in it, but for the life of me I cant get their support to give me access to my account whos password has been lost. Two factor is awesome: yeah until you have a problem.
Crypto was always going to be precarious.
Crypto couldn't work back then due to high transaction fees and the delay until the transaction is permanent.
With Bitcoin, it costs (or used to cost) more than a few dollars to make a transaction because the transactions are "bundled" and "attached" to the chain, which happens once every 10 minutes for bitcoin. So the more you pay in transaction fees, the higher priority your transaction will get and be put in blockchain faster.
For Ethereum, it's every 14 seconds these days but they moved to other validation methods with which there's a chance to have much lower transaction costs and "transaction complete" times.
Besides cost of the transaction, there's also the time necessary to have the transaction permanent - if you want to make sure the transaction is permanent and can't be reverted, it was recommended to wait at least 2-3 blocks to be added to the chain.
In the case of Ethereum, I had companies that waited up to 5 minutes after my transaction was added to the blockchain (me transferring ethereum to them) and only then after a bunch of blocks were added after the block with my transaction, they considered the transaction complete.
One can also send a transaction with such low transaction fee (gas in the case of ethereum) that would expire, never picked up to be bundled in blocks and added to chain, because other transactions had higher priority. So you may see on their phone that the payment is initiated, but you can't trust it until the transaction is actually on the blockchain and even then there's a risk of reversal for a few minutes.
So if you're at a store and want a chewing gum or a bottle of milk, they're not gonna be willing to take your ethereum transaction and wait 1m or so until the transaction is guaranteed.
With ethereum going stake proof, it would be possible for those 14s until validation to go much lower, to like 2-5 seconds, maybe even less.
I could see crypto transactions working through a known payment processor - apple pay or ... i don't want paypal but they could do it - such services would be able to guarantee to shops that transactions would go through..
Cashapp is something typical american otherwise. ... Here in Romania every bank has online services and free transfer between cards of same bank , I can do it from my phone app or regular website and even between different banks. I pay for my lunch every day by transferring 10-15$ to a colleague who goes to a store to buy food, by transferring money though my bank's app for no fees.
For people that aren't using the same bank, I just need the name of the person and the IBAN code and transfer fees are usually like 50 cents to a dollar / euro between banks, and usually next day in the morning you have the money in your account.
So its 2022 and which coin won? Cashapp. Really, thats what all the kids use that sell weed in the city, how you send a few bucks to a friend, or now cash app is like a Bank, checking and ATM card for a lot of young and poor people who cant get bank accounts or dont mind paying $5.00 to to withdraw 10$ (plus probably and ATM fee too, its crazy).
Cashapp is not avaiable here in Australia
Cash is still king! And just as private, and a LOT more secure, than crypto.
I think eventually some form of digital currency will get established that you can use to pay for pretty much anything directly.
There's definitely a demand to escape the ridiculously high fees for credit card/paypal/currency conversions.
It really does have to be a decentralized digital currency rather than a new company providing a better service though, because we already know what happens when a new company enters the payment market. It starts off good but they just slowly up their fees to match the credit card companies. (Paypal)
How long it will take for a proper/usable decentralized digital currency, who knows.
And you can bet the companies who stand to lose money will try to buy it out or take control if at all possible.
I expect some dirty tactics once it starts to take hold. Like credit card companies adding terms and condition that if you accept CC payments on your website you cannot accept crypto payments etc..
As with a lot of things, it takes much longer to happen than everyone expects.
I would say we're probably at about generation 2 of crypto currently, and we need to get to generation 3 or probably 4 before it will get proper traction for everyday use.
...
Anyways I just remembered I have a binance account with some ETH or BTC, its got something in it, but for the life of me I cant get their support to give me access to my account whos password has been lost. Two factor is awesome: yeah until you have a problem.
You're not alone, same thing happened to me with another exchange. Had about 0.5BTC (since BTC was about US$400) and at the peak I wanted to cash out, obviously I couldn't get into my account anymore due to 2FA and support blatantly ignoring my requests.
Backed stablecoins have been a very good replacement for cash. Having USDC on Ethereum, BSC or other big blockchain has been quite reliable, and cheap compared to traditional money sending tech, when it comes to cross border transactions. There are cheaper blockchains as well, when a reliable POS blockchain gets mayor adaptation, we will get transaction costs of 1 cent, and reliability of a bank.
Bitcoin... will be around, and used as an obsolete money truck.
The issue is all the fake stablecoins, that get hyped and then they crash and bun. Terra-luna was probably the latest one. Promised to be stable, and it was just a ponzi. These projects have to go before mayor adaptation.
When an economy tanks, money is king. You can keep it under the bed and anyone in the locality will accept it. It's also out of the way of taxation. I am minded to note that yesterday my bank's cash machines were
out of cash. For some reason here in the UK there is a run on physical cash. Cannot help wonder why?
The fail with blockchain currency is that it became hyjacked by the same casino bankers who in 2008, created the very same mistrust in banks. A mistrust spawned in the deregulated global banking system. London, New York and Singapore were the legitimate store fronts of a system that was manufacturing bad debt by the trillion dollar truck load. As early as 2004 the red lights were on suggesting a derailment. Who lost? Not those who were able to sell their bad debt for dollars before the crash. Move on a decade, and the wealthy discoverd a totally new unregulated mechanism to mint their own money - by selling
digital tokens ponzi nothing for real US dollars.
Not only an unregulated market, but one that's designed from the Github up, to be decentralized. Hence, no-one has overall control. Well maybe not quite; the exchanges and their whale clients ended up acting as central banks on the crypto networks, defining their own self favouring terms and conditions. And as this crypto thing is all about computers
and only
teenagers know about computers, right? So we put our trust in rich kid wunderkinders. Wunderkinds who were barely out reception class when the last digital dot com bubble burnt billion$ of other people's money.
Tokenomics like economics is a cyclic thing.
When an economy tanks, money is king. You can keep it under the bed and anyone in the locality will accept it. It's also out of the way of taxation. I am minded to note that yesterday my bank's cash machines were out of cash. For some reason here in the UK there is a run on physical cash. Cannot help wonder why?
Not good for long term though as inflation will just eat away it's value.
I still recommend having at least a few months worth of normal expenses in cash on hand at all times though. The rest can be in investment assets that are fairly liquid.
Just a reminder, I accept many form of crypto on my web store and even have discount for using it. I'll happy take anyones unwanted crypto
I think eventually some form of digital currency will get established that you can use to pay for pretty much anything directly.
There's definitely a demand to escape the ridiculously high fees for credit card/paypal/currency conversions.
It really does have to be a decentralized digital currency rather than a new company providing a better service though, because we already know what happens when a new company enters the payment market. It starts off good but they just slowly up their fees to match the credit card companies. (Paypal)
It costs money to run payment networks and systems, fraud prevention, account keeping, insurances. That's what your % transaction fee covers. Any new digital currency handling system that can be trusted will skim a % of the transaction to manage the system. Otherwise you are back to the wild west of crypto. And we all see how that's going...
Not good for long term though as inflation will just eat away it's value.
there are mechanism to cope with inflation, but afaik so far no technically sound mechanism to deal with lost password.
I think eventually some form of digital currency will get established that you can use to pay for pretty much anything directly.
There's definitely a demand to escape the ridiculously high fees for credit card/paypal/currency conversions.
It really does have to be a decentralized digital currency rather than a new company providing a better service though, because we already know what happens when a new company enters the payment market. It starts off good but they just slowly up their fees to match the credit card companies. (Paypal)
It costs money to run payment networks and systems, fraud prevention, account keeping, insurances. That's what your % transaction fee covers. Any new digital currency handling system that can be trusted will skim a % of the transaction to manage the system. Otherwise you are back to the wild west of crypto. And we all see how that's going...
Yep, agreed. But not 4.4% + $0.30 (Paypal) (% varies around the world)
They are raking in the profits.
It's easier for them to have less fraud prevention and instead just have higher fees to cover having to refund people when scammed than to actually spend time/money to develop a system that is hard to scam people with.
That's always the problem having a business or profit driven entity handle money distribution, the bigger they get the less efficient they are and the more it costs to run.
The bigger they get the more people working there are in pointless positions just taking a pay cheque but not really providing any benefit to the users.
Not good for long term though as inflation will just eat away it's value.
there are mechanism to cope with inflation, but afaik so far no technically sound mechanism to deal with lost password.
There is no mechanism to deal with inflation when you hold cash. Your cash drops in value, it's literally the definition of inflation.
Not good for long term though as inflation will just eat away it's value.
there are mechanism to cope with inflation, but afaik so far no technically sound mechanism to deal with lost password.
There is no mechanism to deal with inflation when you hold cash. Your cash drops in value, it's literally the definition of inflation.
Exactly, which is why investment exists. To get a better-than-inflation return and grow wealth.
Not good for long term though as inflation will just eat away it's value.
there are mechanism to cope with inflation, but afaik so far no technically sound mechanism to deal with lost password.
There is no mechanism to deal with inflation when you hold cash. Your cash drops in value, it's literally the definition of inflation.
if you keep a millions in your drawer its probably make a difference. during inflation, prices rise because companies/business want to cope with the losses/inflation, in effect salary demands also rise, hence salaries/income also rise, everything will balance out, it could give some effect in short while... its different with recession which can have more bad effect in longer time. there was a time my father told me when $100 is enough for the family for a month, i cant imagine thats going to happen today. expecting price drop is a wishfull thought, price will never drop, its always rise, like entropy
https://time.com/nextadvisor/investing/expert-say-how-long-will-take-inflation-to-come-down/
