In 1999, you probably couldn’t use a Discover card in your local shop either, 13 years after Discover was founded. It took many years and many lawsuits to make headway against Visa/Mastercard.
Universal acceptance isn’t the right measuring stick here.
Even if a shop uses either of these cryptocurrencies, it is comically slow to be used as such anyway rendering them useless. Not to mention the volatility impact.
So please tell me retail shop I can make a purchase using cryptocurrency that is fast, truly decentralised, eco-friendly and doesn't have exorbitant fees.
We both know the obvious reasons that cryptocurrencies enable rampant ransomware [0], multiple rug pull scams [1], pointless NFTs [2] and is totally unregulated, I'm seeing crypto bros heralding 'we need decentralisation and web3' when this is all owned by VCs [3] And don't get me started on the Tether fraud [4].
I was being _generous_ in seeing if cryptocurrencies passes the 'retail shop test' and it can't even do that without burning the planet up making useless computations.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-treasury-warns-c...
[1] https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/12/17/defi-rug-pull-sc...
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dyem/investors-spent-milli...
- Spam has been a problem since the inception of email, and the majority of email is spam. We don't ban email.
- Baseball cards are similarly pointless. So are in-game cosmetic items. We haven't banned those.
The problems you're describing are mostly unrelated to crypto, have existed, and will continue to exist whether crypto remains.
This doesn't mean there are no valid criticisms of crypto - energy concerns are real, and need to be addressed - but if you wish to ban crypto for the reasons you've cited, you need to widen the scope of what you hope to ban.
Once banned that is where they will reside, I hear that Monero is thriving in that (illicit) environment, as well as Bitcoin, Ethereum (paired with Tornado)
But for now banning is likely.
Come on. There are people in this very thread who are using it to evade draconian currency controls their governments have imposed. Are they lying?
Whether the positives outweigh the negatives in Crypto is subject to debate. But to refuse to acknowledge that ANY positives exist is outright bizarre.
There are lots of things I strongly dislike (eg: religion, guns) but to insist that there are absolutely zero positive aspects to these things in certain contexts would be intellectually dishonest.
While I don't directly pay with crypto, I still use it to pay for things at my local shop.