Stablecoins like USDC, if everything around it is legit, can be viewed as a programmable dollar... circumventing everything and anything bank-related to do the same work. That's pretty legit IMO.

That’s a big if. People are offering 10+% interest for USDC, but not for USD. This implies massive risk, as those interest rates are much higher than junk bonds.

Two economists are walking down the street and see a $20 bill lying on the sidewalk.

The first economist says, "Look at that $20 bill."

The second says, "That can't really be a $20 bill lying there, because if it were, someone would have picked it up already."

They walk on.

> if everything around it is legit

Ha ha ha. That would only be possible with a government issued digital currency. Any private company running a "stablecoin" is guaranteed fraudulent. Can't be legit.

https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/1398722723543760897

I notice that you say "can be viewed as" not "are used for"... USDC is just used as a lubricant for crypto speculation. Payment or remittance providers don't use USDC because it isn't actually better. Sure, now you have a programmable dollar; why isn't anyone programming anything good with it?

You're not very good at experimenting then. I first bought BTC in 2013 because of a legitimate purpose: to pay for online goods (legal software) to a seller who wanted to completely eliminate any risk of chargebacks.

Completely eliminating any risk of chargebacks mostly shifts risk back onto the customer; I don't think it's a net benefit. Some businesses seem to intrinsically have sky-high chargeback rates but I'd prefer that those businesses simply not exist rather than put up with the existence of crypto.

I once bought donuts from a food truck with BTC and the donuts were good but the payment process was really slow.

I own a small online business selling custom-configured RPIs and chargebacks are terrible. Businesses build reputations but expect their customers to be anonymous every time. It would be far better if chargebacks were eliminated and customers could review the merchants to reduce fraud. Putting all the risk on the merchants is backwards.

The merchant is the one who has more capital and more information about the product he's selling. I think it's fair that the merchant bears most of the risk.

Credit Card/Chargebacks are not a silver bullet. Countries like India have alternative payment methods without chargebacks and some Merchants insist on them.

And 8 years later the fees no longer make it viable for even that niche use case.

What fee? Are you talking about a specific currency or all currencies? In Celo currently fees are 0.1 cent per transaction, for example.

I've never heard of a single physical item being sold for any other cryptocurrency, only Bitcoin.

How would a merchant of physical goods even know about something like Celo, whatever that is?

Adoption takes time.

Surely you recognize that this is a bad faith argument? The average transaction fee today is around $8 USD. That's a small price to pay for knowing that a transaction is set in stone.

It's a pretty high price to pay for donuts though. Especially since it's kind of hard to reverse a donut transaction after you've eaten them.