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Comment by yzdbgd | Hacker News Reader

Stablecoins are much better for payments, no one would use BTC for goods and services with the transaction fee and the confirmation time being so bad.

https://www.coinbase.com/institutional/research-insights/res...

TL;DR from the article : Stablecoins settled $10.8T worth of transactions in 2023 of which $2.3T were related to organic activities including payments and cross-border remittances, among others

Today’s payment giants suffer from major disadvantages including high transaction costs, slower settlement times and limited transparency albeit there are tradeoffs to stablecoins too

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But at that point you are giving up on the alleged benefits of crypto (decentralization) and you might as well just pay cash.

Not quite. Stablecoins are still more decentralized than classic fiat and AFAIU it's easier to trade stablecoins to/from other coins/tokens.

Practical example, credit/debt card processors almost universally have banned/are banning many adult content sites, but those sites are starting to accept stablecoins.

While stablecoins can be tracked, transactions cannot be universally controlled, especially not by private entities (depends on the exact stablecoin of course).

To purchase goods and services with Bitcoin such as Lightning where fees are negligible. It is indeed being used worldwide. E.g., you can purchase a wide array of things with Lightning at Bitrefill.com

oops, not sure what happened, meant to say "To purchase goods and services with Bitcoin, you would use a layer 2 protocol such as Lightning..."

As someone who was paid in stablecoins, I'm not a huge fan of them, because the final exchange rate still sucks - there's a 10% drop in value from USDC to MYR. While I definitely don't recommend BTC, ADA and LINK actually convert better here.

> Stablecoins are much better for payments

Stablecoins on what 'network/coin/layer/chain'?

Stablecoins on top of ETH? On top of SOL? On top of ETH BASE? On top of ETH Arbitrum/Optimism? Binance Smart Chain? Tron? Polygon?

Doesn’t even matter, because stablecoins are basically acknowledging that all of the crypto tech is a farce and all you need is a digital currency tied to IRL currencies.

> that all of the crypto tech is a farce

Kind of. I would say blockchain hasn't really worked out. Walmart/shipping industries isn't forcing their suppliers to be on some public blockchain, that's for sure.

The on ramp and off ramp stories for crypto to/from fiat are pretty gross. I can send money with Venmo, CashApp, PayPal, etc. domestically

As soon as you talk about (probably breaking some laws) international transfers, it's an interesting tech that's getting adopted.

The blockchain aspects of it kind of don't matter. People just want to send USD-backed-something over country border walls, right?

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