While it is the case that most things get priced relative to BTC, and this does have a network effect since you end up exiting to BTC and thus reenforce its price, it's increasingly common to see trading pairs for ETH, LTC, USDC/USDT. There is interest in getting more liquidity into the market and that's a large part of "DeFi". It's not that BTC is self-perpetuating lock-in, it's that they're all growing but everything else is running several years behind, so on a day to day basis BTC still holds relatively more of the market.
Another option is of course that one crypto would just overtake Bitcoin. If I remember correctly this almost happend with Ethereum and was called the flippening. This scenario would be better for crypto of course than a real Bitcoin crash.
But you can't make a trustless exchange on top of a custodial framework.
Base layer has to be trustless / permissionless; all manner of third parties can build all kind of things on top of that.
But reverse isn't true - if base layer controlled by small number of third parties; nothing built on top can claw back that control.
Only once have I ever use the deferred payment aspect of a card, and that was a 0% APR offer.
The necessity for reversibility, and the inflexibility of being limited either to it, or some form of it, is indicative of an inherent, unfixable flaw in the system itself.
This flaw limits the systems growth, adaptability, and usefulness.
Now, on the UX topic, btc has a lot to improve. But I’m always surprised how rapidly people assume their transactions in fiat are settling as a comparative criticism for Bitcoin.
Do you have a source for that? I tried looking and everything I saw is it would take between 24 hours and 3 days on average, for credit cards.
You very well could be right, I'd just like to see something that confirms it, and wasn't able to find anything.
Example source: https://lifehacker.com/this-is-why-your-credit-card-transact...
The bulk of fiat does not move around on peoples payment cards or in cash in their hands, it moves in bank-to-bank transfers that indeed do take days or even weeks, and further have an up to 10% failure rate.
It may well be that through the use of caveats you don't see or think about, you are able to execute small transactions quickly with fiat, but it is the counterparty to your transactions who is bearing the burden of fiats shortcomings in these cases.
For example, if we're comparing digitally, in most cases, you are able to arbitrarily reverse the transaction up to or even over a month later, claiming it as fraudulent, or rejecting it for some other reason justifiable to you, but for which the vendor has little recourse. This is the concept of "transaction finality", and with fiat it is very, very broken.
With cash a similar problem exists with counterfeit money, a vendor may collect up a weeks earnings, only to take them to the bank and have a percentage of them rejected.
All of these problems are solved by crypto, it improves on money in many key ways (these are just a couple), that's its point, and why people are excited about it enough to drive its collective value up to the region of Apple's stock value, around 4x faster than Apple took to do so.
Worked quite well for me when my credit card details were stolen and I could revert $8k of purchases immediately. If my wallet keys are stolen or cracked, I will lose everything with "transaction finality" - that would be a problem which is enabled not solved by crypto.
That crypto can do new things, and yet may also facilitate all of the (useful) old things, simply makes it a superior tool. There can be no fundamental argument against this.
It's a bit like worrying about how internet users will deal with IP packets that don't arrive, in the context of thinking about about how smooth an experience they're going to have surfing the web. It's not, and won't be, their problem to deal with.
The fact adoption has rushed ahead such that many multi-millions of users are faced with the base layer is analogous to if millions had rushed into using the internet when it was command-line only. Sure, if that had happened, many people would make mistakes and delete their drives or whatever - and this illustrates how wanted and overdue crypto is.
There are tremendous consequences of using this tech at the base layer incorrectly, but it doesn't appear to be dissuading adoption.
... and yet the world turns; and credit cards amount to $3tn of payments in the U.S annually.
As it turns out, businesses do not actually care about instant settlement of payment transactions that much, what's important is instant authorization.
Credit cards are small by comparison.
https://mobile.twitter.com/yassineARK/status/134613927863667...
First of all, global credit card volumes are much larger than Bitcoin volumes. Asia Pacific has been a bigger credit card market than the U.S. for some time - for example.
Secondly, credit cards payments are overwhelmingly payments for services or goods; effectively none of Bitcoin's total volume is in that category.
In fact, virtually all of Bitcoin volume is gross settlement and relates to speculative trading activity.
On-chain transactions are for a variety of things, but they are all payments, which was the criteria in question you brought up.
Regardless of how you might opine on those payments "merit" (I could equally deride the usefulness of plastic trinkets ordered from China on Amazon - for what good it would do), they are not insignificant on Bitcoin compared to legacy systems. They are all payments settled either from one party to another, or between one party's multiple accounts, and just because they are almost entirely "only" settlements does not imply they are somehow not useful or otherwise to be derided.
Where does that number even come from? I've been trying to source anything that's even vaguely in the same ballpark and coming up empty. Most of the sources I can find suggest ~$100bn a day.
But no, in any case, that's not what I'm talking about either. Nor am I trying to apply any moral value to the purposes to which payments are put.
The point is: you can't say "credit cards are small relative to BTC" without consider the segmentation of the payment market in the fiat world.
I encourage you to provide evidence of the size of the "credit card" usage (i.e. goods and services payments) of BTC. Good data is hard to find but it's self-evidently not in the "trillions of USD per year" order-of-magnitude.
If you want to talk about the gross settlements segment, again, BTC is a minnow. Sure counting every transaction on the BTC blockchain, it's a few $tn a year currently. Fedwire does that much every day, and that's only for inter-institutional transfer.
You said "credit cards amount to $3tn of payments [my emphasis] in the U.S annually.", doing so as if this somehow made crypto appear small. I pointed out that Bitcoin alone does more than this per year in payments since 2018, and that there are thousands of other crypto projects. Many of these are also making comparable numbers of payments.
By the simple metric of how much value cryptocurrency users are transmitting with each other as payments, versus how much users of credit cards are doing - which was the original framing as I understood it - crypto wins. And of course it does, you may be right its an apples to hand grenades comparison, but the simple fact of the matter is we are comparing apples to hand grenades.
In some ways this is all about as useful as comparing how many miles horses and carts are doing versus steam or combustion engines.
The point is, even early on, per mile travelled, engines win. And they do so not just because they can travel further faster, but because they enable new use-cases by doing so - just like crypto.
Crypto has been here for ten years already and despite being derided as a toy early on, is now worth, and transferring, trillions.
See you after the next ten years, when credit cards will almost certainly be as VHS tapes are now.
Cryptocurrencies developed on 10+ year old tech, that have stayed in that state throughout may indeed have very poor tps as you state. However, this is absolutely not the majority, as that base tech has iterated both at the base level, and in the application of layers. Typical these days are tps-handling in the 1k's - 10k's, and beyond. This will only keep improving as the technology progresses.
Many systems capable of such throughout are heavily under-utilised, showing that crypto technology is generally ahead of those needs. That there have been hiccups have been more due to "brand loyalty", not tech deficiency, but even those technologies (Ethereum, mainly), are in the process of being upgraded.
Given tps in the fiat world is somewhat of an inapplicable metric, as fiat transactions typically take in the order of days to complete - it's even more of a misleading comparison. Credit cards achieve 30k tps throughput only with the considerable caveats of reversibility and 30 day (or longer) finality. Crypto suffers from no such limitations.
The majority of worth in the space is absolutely not of "criminal origin", demographics of crypto holders have been studied extensively and are readily available.