How so? What matters is the price at the time of transaction, no?
I bought BTC at 200, 400, 800, 1200, 3000, 11,000, and 7,000.
I like BTC wayyy better than USD. If I need to spend 2$ at taco bell, I'll just use my bitcoin.
The currency you're using is USD, since that's how Taco Bell set their prices and it's how you're measuring the value of your bitcoins (via the exchange rate).
I've yet to see any business set their prices in bitcoin. Everyone accepting bitcoin payment is setting their prices in fiat currency (e.g. $2), and accepting an equivalent amount of bitcoin (based on market rates); i.e. treating bitcoin as a payment gateway rather than a currency.
It's the same thing.
This a completely emotional argument, there's no logic behind it, you could also regret spending $2 at Taco Bell instead of on Bitcoin.
Shift card had like a 10$ fee for printing the card, but its free and instant.
The only time I did an on-chain transaction in the last 3 years was moving money to another exchange to buy alt-coins.
I increasingly feel that pro-crypto arguments are mostly motte and bailey. So Bitcoin is better than fiat because it's decentralized and censorship-resistant, with everything forever stored in the blockchain. It's also more convenient and efficient than fiat in daily use - when we discard all the decentralization and anti-censorship guarantees, skip the blockchain and use it as a private-issued, unregulated fiat.
This isn't at all different from the way many people separate their investments and savings accounts from their checking accounts, except that in this case, the investment/savings accounts get "magical crypto guarantees."
This isn't rocket science.
That is an option.
I dont care about 'trust' when I spend 2 dollars at taco bell on my shift card. I dont care about 'trust' when I give my friend 200 dollars with coinbase email.
5 bitcoin? Yeah I'll take that out of coinbase.
But this is a payment platform IMO. I use paypal and venmo too. They dont charge fees and I dont really care about decentralization magic.
So you used a "totally not a bank, but really a bank" bank, eh?
2FA > a piece of paper under my bed.
But also I keep my bitcoin in lots of places, a few bucks in coinbase for free transactions is like keeping cash in my wallet.
It's a matter of opinion. However, the only reason for bitcoin to exist is to avoid banks and payment processors. Hence it's illogical to make heavy use of coinbase/etc. regardless of what opinion you have.
Bitcoin has many downsides (volatility, no recourse, vast energy usage, paranoid wallet security, high fees, long confirmation time, etc.) and one upside (no need to trust processors/banks).
If you think that processors/banks are bad, then you might find that the upside outweighs the downsides, and make many on-chain bitcoin transactions. Yet you shouldn't use coinbase/etc. in this case, since they're a bank/processor, hence you'd be removing the only upside that bitcoin has.
On the other hand, if you don't think that processors/banks are bad, then the upside of bitcoin isn't worth all of the downsides. You might as well use regular currency, with all of its advantages over bitcoin (instant payments, lower fees, lower volatility, recourse, less paranoid security, etc.). In this case there's no need to use coinbase/etc. because there's no need to use bitcoin.
Those intermediaries do serve a role in converting between traditional currencies and cryptocurrencies, but it only makes sense to use them occasionally, e.g. buying a stash of bitcoins and immediately 'withdrawing' them to your private, on-chain-only wallet. If you're regularly converting back and forth, or maintaining a non-zero balance on their systems, you would always be better off doing something else (either sticking to fiat, or sticking to crypto).
Not true. If your purpose is holding inflation-resistant money, payment processors and bitcoin banks may be perfectly ok.