Unpopular opinion: why do we care so much about making it cheaper for rich people to move money around? Do we think somehow that will “trickle down” to us mere mortals and put western union and their ilk out of business?
If it was an efficient way to cut on fees, everyone would do it. Yet almost nobody does.
The issue is that these two can’t be filled by the same instrument effectively. Currencies need to be stable and predictable, nobody wants to discover that their paycheck has suddenly halved in value. They can inflate, but they should do that in a slow and steady manner so wages can keep up. On the other hand you want some volatility in your speculative instruments, as without volatility there’s no real opportunity to earn a profit and grow your net worth.
If something tries to be both, the results are disappointing. Either there’s no enough volatility to make traders happy, or there’s enough volatility to expose laborers or payment processors (depending on use case) to purchasing power shocks or conversion rate risks.
Unfortunately, it’s my belief that bitcoin maintains a lot of its value by trying to continually bring in new suckers (sorry, investors) in order to keep demand high without significant use cases. This kind of continual recruitment process is both fascinating, and really ruins bitcoin for anyone who wanted to use it for non-speculative purposes.
And bank adoption hasn’t been exactly smooth so far either: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-blockchain-ripple-idUSKBN...
Making capital transfers easy while restricting the movement of real people ghettoizes and traps people for corporate convenience and cost savings.
And my word choice was accurate; what you choose to read in to it happens in your head, not mine.
Capital doesn't put a drain on the social welfare systems of the country you're sending it to.
And I'm definitely not saying that the current generation of crypto has figured this problem out, but I am hopeful for the sake of SMB that they won't always have to pay 3% fees on cashless transactions.
Want to order food online? That’ll be 30% on top of your order, please.
Oh, you wanted to pay for some bits through our app on your iPhone? Apple will take 30% of that too, thank you very much.
We just switched HOA management companies and they had the audacity to charge a three dollar convenience fee if you pay your bill online! So I will just continue to pay via paper check and make life miserable for them because that incurs no fee.
All I see is hypocrisy and more hands in my pocket wanting my money, not less.
Filecoin (the currency) exists on top but is completely independent and unnecessary to make use of the underlying utility of IPFS.
While bitcoin is a bit of a monolith even it has utility beyond currency as you can write information along with your transactions. An example is [ION][1] an identity service pegging state to transactions wiring to the blockchain and so long as bitcoin holds value you can have high certainty this information will not go away or be modified.
There are trade-offs to everything but often the benefit of crypto projects is lost when they’re viewed as currency rather than utility. Look at the forest not the trees.
[1]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-active-director...
Rich people don't have to care about a 20$ fee. Poor people do though.
Many have speculated he may be a time traveler, although they don't give any reason. The only thing I can think of is he possibly traveled back in time after witnessing a massive economic downturn that had people eating rats off the street and an even further (much more serious) dichotomy of rich and poor. Bitcoin could level the playing field stopping banks from having nearly full monopoly of your money.
There’s no way it’s then suddenly a cost effective way for normal currency billionaires to move money around. Converting that amount to BTC would require serious fees and resources.
So this point is largely moot to any wider discussion.
So stop caring and move on to whatever it is you want to do with your life.