For a payments system, the fact that all transactions are final is pretty bad. I'd say this, by itself, makes the system unusable in the real world.
That a transaction is final is not a flaw but one of the main features.
I don't use dispute resolution unless someone actually stole my credit card number like when my card info was jacked at a gas pump one time. Credit cards are quite insecure and we still have to type in all our personal info online every single transaction which is dangerous and dumb and makes the whole system vulnerable to credit card fraud in a way that crypto isn't. When you use crypto you simply sign a transaction message, you don't have to give away your private keys to make the transaction occur.
That's just what humans do to each other. New tech is always like this when there are gains to be made.
Some folks look at the trend that central banks have been on and the creep of financial surveillance and think purposefully going backward in some areas isn't silly at all.
In the end, it's software you don't have to use. Nobody is forcing anyone to opt in, right (you know, like the credit bureaus who in America force you to opt in if you intend to... I dunno, participate in the economy in a meaningful way)?
Second, adoption is way up and btc is only one cryptocurrency. It gets first-mover advantage in this market (unfairly, probably) and so continues to be a bellwether despite the fact that it is a relative dinosaur, technology wise. I'm fine with that, personally, despite the problems with the technology.
That you haven't adopted the tech doesn't mean that adoption is failing, you know. There are more users every year (this is difficult to pin down for obvious & good reasons, but the indicators are solid) and no technology with millions of users globally, including institutional adopters, can be said to be failing.
Further, to call any payments technology 'mildly popular' which safeguards USD 1.5-2.5 trillion (total cryptocurrency market cap, BTC accounting for over 760 billion alone, despite the recent corrections) in deflationary wealth undermines your argument to the point of bad faith. Is the cryptocurrency market overheated and full of nonsense? Of course. But let's do the analyses with level heads at least.
Humans have been using credit systems for millennia. The implication that in the olden days people only walked around with bits of gold in their pockets is a bit of “retconning.”
This article includes some interesting tidbits: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/05/the-invention-...
Paper currency is a couple millenia older than the printing press, using woodlblock printing.
If we're talking specifically about credit cards, the credit card went from new invention to ubiquity in a couple of decades. But I think that's too narrow a scope to look at, to be honest.
Early credit systems did not depend upon the printing press; think of the widespread use of tally sticks in medieval Europe to enable illiterate low-technology credit systems.
It's really hard to approach this anthropologically, IMO, because so many other variables change. Less complex economies do fine with "local communism" and person-to-person debt, but it's hard to imagine using such a thing to order from Amazon. Conversely, coinage historically was useful if you had to exchange with someone with whom you didn't have a personal relationship (say, you're traveling to a faraway land and you can't just provide an IOU), but that's somewhat obsolete now.
I guess my conclusion would be that these historical analogies don't shed a lot of light.
https://www.amazon.com/History-Money-Jack-Weatherford/dp/060...
In Europe credit cards are not very common, and debit card transactions are often not reversible.
A generalisation like this is no better than the frequent occurrence of HNers posting articles headlined with "the nation" which mean "the USA".
Anyone who has worked with payment processing can tell you how rare debit card chargebacks are, this is because they’re usually vastly more difficult.
And no, your comment on Ethereum is about 4 years outdated.
The fundamental issue is that creating scalable, cheap credit infrastructure for mass economic activity is fundamentally in opposition with creating an investment that will continually gain in value. You see this really clearly in Ethereum, where’s gas fees can be exceptionally high compared to traditional financial institutions.
Or https://compound.finance/ also a great project.
Ethereum's gas fees have nothing to do with the price of the base asset: it has to do with limited block size availability. When the network is congested, block size is limited and this causes transactions to be bid up in an auction format to get in first.
This is one of the costs of decentralization. However, recent advances in Zero Knowledge Proof cryptography has paved a path for Ethereum to take to get to VISA scale and beyond and be able to process 200K transactions per second (at pennies or less per tx): see https://zksync.io/ and https://starkware.co/.
There are already a large number of crypto projects partnering with existing businesses to address real problems. I don't see a minority ideology standing in the way of this.
Here's various businesses running oracles for smart contracts including Deutsch Telecom: https://chain.link/ecosystem/data-providers
Here's Ernst & Young's take on the technology: https://www.ey.com/en_us/blockchain
They are not. They're offering a pre-paid card that users can top up with their crypto.com wallets. [1]
The Crypto.com Visa Card is a prepaid card. Broadly speaking, prepaid cards are the same as debit cards. The difference is that debit cards are linked to your bank account, but prepaid cards need to be topped up. In our case, you can top up using bank account transfers, other credit/debit cards, or cryptocurrency.
And Deutsch Telecom isn't using a blockchain either. They're selling data to a company that then puts the data on a blockchain. That's not using a blockchain.
And Visa clearly said: that Anchorage will be its “digital asset settlement agent” and that it will “integrate [its] treasury systems with Anchorage.”
“After further testing and additional conversations with clients, partners and members of the regulatory community, we hope to launch this capability for other partners in the year ahead,” Visa said in a blog post about the news.
Read it from their official press release, a couple times: https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...
Multisig escrow is also better in every way if people want to involve a third party in case of a dispute
SWIFT international wires do cost the DI more, but not several orders of magnitude more. I don't happen to know that number off hand.
Some retail banks charge a lot for wires because they can - people don't use them frequently (as to your point its not what people want most of the time) and usually only for bigger purchases so the fee matters less.
However, if this is something you do more often, banks offer steep, steep discounts over sticker.
And BTW no we dont need bitcoin for this at all its depreciated tech. But other DLT can be very usefully. There is a reason CBDCs are a huge topic in global finance.
With technology getting faster, I regret not mining a few coins.
I even bought the sound cards?
A life if regrets because I didn't follow my gut feelings, or let people sway my decisions?
(Would I invest in Bitcoin now. Hell no, but years ago yes. It will deflate, along with NTF's, and the stock market soon.)
Not be able to reverse transaction is not a feature, it's a fundamental flaw. There is absolutely no advantage to the consumer or the producer to have all transactions immediately permanent.
The rest of your comment reveals your bias: You don't really care about it working technologically, you just wish you had made money on it.
The slow transition away from “mass adoption soon!” is extremely entertaining to me.
Why, pray tell, for a currency would developers matter more than end users?
Many people are certainly buying in to crypto with the intent of selling it later at a profit. But that’s unrelated from its utility.
Usage as in number of network participants. People investing time, energy, risk into the system. Miners, traders, validators, second layer operators. Similar to members of facebook, servers in the internet. Price as in market price. And I'm only talking Bitcoin here.
It'd be like if the number of Facebook accounts kept rising, but hardly anyone posts content anymore. If I were a Facebook investor, that would worry me.
First I've heard of this. Do you have more information?
And the idea that miners have a god-given right to make $100 per transaction, $40m per day, and therefore if the mining reward halves, the price of BTC must inevitably double, is obviously preposterous.
Note, not speculation in Bitcoin, usage of it as an actual currency.
I agree with you. Both versions of this argument have to stop in favor of actual discussion (which, it seems, there is a good amount of in this thread)
Most technology companies should hold it on their balance sheets and employ a contributor.
What do you mean by saying people fell for "this"? I assume you mean it's a scam but I will wait for your reply.