Yeah, but why would anyone want to do that when credit cards already exist?

Eventually it should be a sensible choice. The goal is for crypto (not bitcoin) to be more economically sensible to run credit card style infrastructure. Clearly, this is not currently true but I expect it will improve to the point where most services use some aspect of crypto because it makes sense economically.

No, it will not be a sensible choice. There are some pretty deep, social problems in the crypto space that make this an extremely unlikely outcome.

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.

Check out Aave: its a lending protocol carrying $20B in assets on smart contracts. It works great! https://aave.com/

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/.

I think you're mistaken. Cryptocurrencies are anarcho-capitalist money. They're not economical or user friendly because that would mean they cannot be decentralised. Anarcho-capitalists are okay with that because for them their ideology is more important than practicality but the general public will never adopt a payments system that is more expensive and less practical than the alternatives.

I'm not expecting the average person to adopt a crypto payments system any time soon. Currency is only one aspect. B2B will come first.

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.

They have been trying to sell blockchain technology to businesses for a long time. Nothing has come out of it despite millions spent in r&d and marketing.

Here's Visa announcing they'll be settling USDC transactions on the Ethereum blockchain: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/visa-settles-usdc-transaction...

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

I can't find a specific example of a business that has used a blockchain to achieve something in any of these links.

Visa is a business and they used the Ethereum chain to settle a payment in the form of the USDC ERC20 token. Now, they're just getting started. But from my perspective, I've seen virtually every function that I enjoy from my bank replaced by smart contracts in the past year. And the only thing that's really holding me back from closing my bank account altogether is the legacy integrations that exist. And that will fade with time.

Sure, but they aren't using a blockchain themselves, they're simply letting their clients settle some transactions on the ethereum blockchain. It's not really an example of a business using blockchain technology to its advantage. If they had deployed a blockchain and used that to process transactions, that would be more convincing, but so far I don't think they've done that.

No, they are literally using it, providing resources for it (in the case of Deutsch Telecom), and settling transactions on it. Why would you deploy your own blockchain when you can use a public blockchain like Ethereum and plug into the rich ecosystem that already exists?

> No, they are literally using it

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.

[1] https://crypto.com/cards

Deutsch Telecom operates Chainlink nodes, which are a decentralized method of writing data to the chain. They are paid in LINK for providing this service.

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...

Sorry, man, nowhere in this press release it says Visa is settling transactions on the ethereum blockchain. It says it "plans to offer USDC settlement capability" in the future. And in the footnote they specifically say that this "does not refer to the movement of funds from individual consumer accounts". Deutsch Telecom hasn't even done a press release, so we don't know what their alleged involvement with Chainlink entails other than presumably selling them some data. If this is the best evidence of a supposed trend of blockchain technology adoption in the business world, it strongly suggests that such a trend does not exist at all.

And a ton of money wasted on IBM consultants.