It is perfect for laundering large amounts of value, transacting in business that might not be legal but is between consenting adults (sex work and all the shades of that), or for storing your value somewhere that can be confiscated or inflated away by your local government. You might be willing to tolerate some loss if these are your threat models or use cases (versus being wholly unable to transact).

Everyone else is better served by instant payments with utility pricing provided by a neutral party, such as a central bank or their delegate responsible for implementation on ongoing operations of the system.

You have no idea what you're talking about, right? https://www.axios.com/2023/05/11/stripes-crypto-strategy

"Accepting money is one thing, but paying out money to the rest of the world — especially long-tail countries with poor banking rails is another thing," he said. "It works better than fiat payments in a lot of cases," he added."

Okay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ If you want to bet $10k on the success of this, outline the success criteria and deadline for evaluation of the bet and we'll spin up a Long Bet [1].

Stripe talks a lot, while TranferWise (among others) gets shit done wrt cross border payments on real rails. Crypto is slowly dying while central banks raise rates globally, making the casino attempt at yield unpalatable (most crypto trading was gambling). Africa, for example, is going digital payments faster than some developed countries [2] [3].

Stripe's problem (along with Visa and Mastercard for that matter) is that developing countries are leapfrogging developed world financial infra, and owning it themselves to prevent "light colonization" of this critical financial infra. This compresses the global TAM for the for profit folks who are skimming off rails volume.

[1] https://longbets.org/

[2] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-i...

[3] https://papss.com/

Of course, moving the goal-posts are we?

> "Stripe talks a lot, while TranferWise (among others) gets shit done wrt cross border payments on real rails."

Stripe has also shipped theirs though and it is available and is in use. [0] So have Moneygram [1], Visa [2], Checkout.com [3], PayPal [4] and beyond payments, Walmart Canada is using one right now. [5]

The fact is, they are using blockchains and they are not going away (or dying) anytime soon, like it or not.

[0] https://stripe.com/gb/use-cases/crypto

[1] https://stellar.org/products-and-tools/moneygram

[2] https://usa.visa.com/about-visa/newsroom/press-releases.rele...

[3] https://www.checkout.com/solutions/crypto

[4] https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/crypto...

[5] https://hbr.org/2022/01/how-walmart-canada-uses-blockchain-t...

I don't believe crypto is the future of payments, domestic or international. That's my thesis, and I'm fairly confident in it. If I'm wrong, after evaluating all available data, such is the peril of attempting to predict the future. I will eat crow and say I was wrong if that is the future we arrive at.

PIX in Brazil and UPI in India are evidence of what instant payment systems do to incumbent instant (credit card) rails. Central banks are coming for cross border payments next. For profit firms need profit and investors. Central banks (or other nation state monetary policy orgs with similar functions) simply need mandates. Congress told the Fed to build FedNow (to prevent private/for profit instant rails from gating access), and they did, because they were told to.

Visa, Paypal, and others in the space have an existential crisis, no different than Intuit with the IRS preparing to offer filing for free. A Paypal stablecoin? Are you kidding me? Why would you use that versus an FDIC insured deposit account or a money market fund?

https://archive.ph/vh3Dh | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-23/brazilian...

https://www.livemint.com/economy/indians-pick-upi-over-debit...

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecb.wp2693~8d4e5804...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37920633

https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/cryptocurrencies-tnc?loca...

https://paxos.com/stablecoin-terms-conditions/

None of the examples you mentioned are even world-wide, given that you can't use UPI in Japan, or FedNow can't be used outside of the US or PIX outside of Brazil so are totally useless for users outside of those countries.

These 'rails' are just meant for the introduction of a CBDC in their respective countries which will just have the same issues that Nigeria's eNaira 'CBDC' had which once that was tried, it was a complete failure. [0] [1] which UPI and PIX will have the same problems and will be no different.

[0] https://business.cornell.edu/hub/2023/04/28/nigerias-enaira-...

[1] https://www.pymnts.com/cbdc/2022/nigeria-cuts-atm-cash-withd...

You seem to be very pro crypto, so I don't believe we're going to find middle ground. Appreciate the debate regardless!

So you don't want to take the bet? Signals not much faith in your ideology and thesis. Accountability is important if attempting to predict the future. I believe you believe, but not enough to put value at risk.

Or it signals that 10k is an insignificant amount of money to you, but not everyone else on the forum. Having a lot of money is likely a signal that you're good at your job, but it's not a signal that you're right about everything.

the things you're talking about are the selling point, not the problem. the foundational idea of cryptocurrency is that it is unregulated and therefore allows for fraud, crime, privacy, secrecy whatever. if you don't want to expose yourself to that, don't engage with crypto. much like with TOR, they're a necessary evil to provide online freedom

the problems as I see them are too much private regulation of the market—centralised exchanges that have too much power—and public regulation—KYC—which has largely removed the intended benefits in the first place

> what utility it provides that fiat currencies do not

Forex (for travelers) perhaps? Technically, fiat itself does not provide exchange. you always need a broker or a counterparty. crypto provides liquidity that can replace a paid service (yes I know crypto also has fees).

I have never owned crypto but I think it's a great idea as a currency that should have been able to compete with paypal/credit cards, but somehow didn't. I think that's its greatest failure: the fact that 12 years later I can't buy a sandwich with it.

If all you're buying is sandwiches, you don't need crypto. Crypto is for when you buy things that are a lot more interesting than sandwiches :)

If I'm selling sandwiches, I could make a lot more if I accept an alternative payment with the same convenience as credit but lower tx fees. Privacy conscious buyers may prefer crypto than a bank that sells their purchases to advertisers.

Maybe rather than seeing it as _a_ currency we could see it a special purpose currency for money exchange? A transport medium?

If you are trying to keep your coin over a longer period of time you suffer the high volatility and are at the whims of gamblers. But if it is only used to perform a money transaction which otherwise would not be possible/too expensive/too dangerous, only to be exchanged against a fiat currency immediately after, that could be its role.

> Forex (for travelers) perhaps?

Again, we're talking real world. Have you ever travelled abroad and used BTC to buy something? Has anyone you know ever done that?

so the goalposts just moved from "having utility" to "myself-or-someone-I-personally-know got utility from it"?

> travelled abroad and used BTC to buy something

not the scenario I described. Forex is short for foreign exchange. as in, exchanging to local fiat.

What, no. The goalpost were always “real world utility”. Real world.

I did. Used to refill my eqyptian sim card at bitrefill.io. Much cheaper and easier than go search for refill card at merchants all looking to rob a touristo.

How else can you do private digital transactions other than with something like monero? Given that cash is dying, and mass surveillance on all transactions is incredibly dystopian for reasons I hope are obvious, it fascinates me that HN doesn't see the importance and utility there. What is one meant to do in a few decades if they want to pay for an abortion, buy a copy of 1984, or some weed, receive onlyfans money, or whatever the society doesnt accept in x years?

Imagine you're in a different thread about social credit scores, or mastercard selling user data, or Canadian protestors having their bank accounts frozen...

>Given that cash is dying

And famously, humans did ZERO transacting before the US invented paper currency, right? Or maybe a market exists externally to the financial instruments that can operate in it? Crypto isn't needed for barter. Crypto isn't needed for secret barter. Hell, swap buy sell guides were a thing in my childhood, before anyone paid for anything on the internet.

China invented paper currency, in 7th century AD.

> Really still unclear what utility it provides that fiat currencies do not. Not theoretical utility, like real world utility.

Because it gets you away from the fiat aspect of it.

I'm not talking about the arguments over monetary economics and whether we should just trust central banks not to print too much money; I'm talking about the other type of fiat. If you contribute money to the wrong protesters, "liberal" "democratic" Western governments can and will freeze your bank account. If you live in the wrong country, Visa and Mastercard will cut off your access to your own money as collective punishment for the actions of a government you didn't even freely elect. If you want to trade in goods the government doesn't like, they have ways of making that difficult for you.

Crypto got sold to finance bros as some sort of respectable financial instrument, which it clearly is not. If you're a respectable normal person in a Western country, crypto probably just isn't for you.

Right I am not trying to say that fiat doesn't have problems. I am trying to say that in the real world, crypto has solved none of those problems.

Really? I know lots of people who have used crypto to buy things the government didn’t want them to buy.

Okay, but why is it valueable or useful for us to boost up a financial system whose entire purpose is to bypass any form of non-violent geopolitics. Do you know what happens when you make things like sanctions less effective? You remove one of the only tools for countries to work through the serious disputes that doesn't involve literally shooting each other.

The sanctions were already ineffective, but that’s neither here nor there because none of my examples involve actual, official sanctions. Most of my examples involved people working around their own domestic governments. Even when it comes to Visa and MasterCard locking out Russians, that was, officially at least, purely on the initiative of those two companies rather than any formal economic sanction.