1) Think from their perspective. They have very little upside for integrating with cryptocurrency platforms. It adds nothing to the bottom line. If anything, it subtracts from their bottom line, due to the added compliance work required to prevent crypto money launderers.

2) Stop saying crypto is decentralized. The vast majority of cryptocurrencies are mined by a small minority, and most participants have zero say in the direction of each currency. Yes, you can have a "decentralized" architecture, but not "democratization". Crypto-space ended up with an oligarchy.

#2 is way off. By definition crypto is decentralized. Currencies that currently have the highest market caps (read: most popular) also tend to be open source -- anyone can contribute, and anyone can run a node and perform PoW/PoS contributions.

There are exceptions (XRP), but for the most part your comment reflects a misunderstanding of "crypto-space".

Measuring decentralization is a significant issue in the crypto space. Here’s an interesting article from Earn.com (formerly 21.co) https://news.earn.com/quantifying-decentralization-e39db233c...

If anyone knows of similar articles or studies please share them.

If you read my #2, I basically acknowledge that crypto is decentralized. What I argued is that decentralized does not mean what the vast majority of people thinks it means, which is that it makes financial system more democratic. Many including myself are taking exception to that misconception.

The irony of making it difficult to exit crypto means traditional banking will long-term be on the losing end as people who buy into crypto (even as novelty) won't want to "cash out" due to difficulty while realizing how convoluted the fiat process is when viewed from the outside. They'll find ways to stay in crypto and get things done.

This is false.

When you find that you can't sell your tulips for dutch guilder, you don't set up a mirror economy that uses tulips for currency. Instead, you find tulip prices collapsing, and yourself broke.

Why would my landlord, who is not vested in crypto, want to exchange goods and services for bitcoins that he can't cash out to pay his contractors, taxes, etc? Nobody wants to be paid in illiquid assets, what on earth would possess him to get into that horror show.

Maybe that's what you do, but that's not what I do, and that's certainly not the hacker way.

So instead of saying "this is false", you should be saying "well, this is just, like, my opinion, man."

Your comment adds nothing to the discussion and only serves as an attempt to disregard every point without any reason or fact, and simply because you prefer not to face the facts.

It adds a datapoint (my own behavior) that contradicts the parent's claim of what people will do.

I think what you really mean is "your statement does not contribute to my argument," not "your statement does not contribute to the discussion." There are arguments besides your own, and I am living proof that they live in people.

I'll take your crypto as payment though. And so will other people. Maybe not everyone, but as long as enough people do to make it a currency it has value.

Maybe your landlord isn't into crypto but some other landlord may be.

Also being a little cynical, some landlords may be up for getting rent in an anonymous crypto like zcash and forgetting to pay the income tax on it.

How does the landlord intend to pay tax?

I'm a landlord who accepts crypto.

You can pay tax with a shift payments visa card via coinbase. In general, you pay through an intermediary that swaps it for you, or cash out just what you need to pay tax when you need it.

> traditional banking will long-term be on the losing end as people who buy into crypto (even as novelty) won't want to "cash out" due to difficulty

There is context for this. China and Venezuela's capital controls are why everyone wants to hold renminbi and bolivars.

They want to hold renminbi and bolivars because it is necessary in order to pay taxes.

My comment was facetious. Both countries’ currencies are plagued with flight problems.

Neither of those is true, lol

Surely this is only true if the point of cryptocurrency for those people is to get things done. If it's mostly speculation, as it seems to be right now, not so much.

As someone who's been transfering quite a lot of money through various banks and into crypto I'd imaging the biggest issue is the money laundering type regulations. For transfers much over $20k normal banks want documentation where it came from and all your normal transactions can be viewed by the government for tax enforcement purposes. Once you're in crypto that's all out the window - I've been trading on Kucoin which is kind of based in HK or China but no one quite knows where, doesn't keep much in the way of records, if you were transfering crypto out for drugs or tax purposes no one would know. So I can see how Visa would be worried about being party to that kind of thing and then fined or prosecuted for it.

By the way re "no good way in" I've found coinmate.io pretty good once you get the money to them but it has to come from a bank account in your own name and those can be funny about letting you transfer to them. Also it's kind of slow - once your money arrives you have to wait a day or so for a human to process it.

> 3. This happening is from my perspective just a quick look behind the curtain of the Digital Currency infrastructure problem as it exists today. There is no good way in, or out of digital currency at the moment, and the ones that exist are tenuous at best.

What country do you live in? This has not been true in US or EU for years as Coinbase and Kraken are two excellent options to get in and out. Bitcoin debit cards are a bit of novelty, not some central infrastructure.

I haven't used kraken, but I can say that I would not qualify Coinbase as good... it as at best "usable".

Unacceptably poor customer service, significant markup when buying bitcoin, sometimes a week or more delay between purchase and fulfillment, arduous verification process for new customers, being arbitrarily (from the customer's perspective) flagged for a verification even though you already sent them a photo of your passport 3 months prior, banning customers for sending coins to certain addresses, and did I mention unacceptably terrible customer service? Sometimes just never even responding to a customer ever?

I can't say it's not usable... I have bought bitcoin from there and I did receive it, but the experience has been very far from good.

Comparing Coinbase to ETrade I'd have to disagree. If you want to make small (sub-$1000) transactions, sure Coinbase and Kraken are good enough, but $10k or $100k or $1MM is a totally different story.

To add on to the other poster, Coinbase has some terrible workflows.

Inconsistent card verification, ID verification is pretty much broken (intentionally or not).

We're talking about bitcoin here - the talk of fees extracted and of centralisation as a bad thing look somewhat odd given that context.