[linsomniac]

To me, this seems like a good reason a cryptocurrency COULD take off. The established payment companies are stuck in the past, and pretty much everyone just upgraded their point of sale equipment to handle chip and pin. We might be ripe for a revolution in the payment space. Credit cards have been dragging their feet, and there's a ton of money flowing through them.

[tyingq]

Bitcoin confirmations take 10+ minutes, and there's no notion of a chargeback.

I could see crypto currency replacing Western Union, for sending money to family far away. Replacing credit cards has some gaps on both the consumer and merchant sides.

[notahacker]

The advantage of Western Union is that the person receiving the money be unbanked, living in a cash economy, and not even necessarily be literate, never mind technologically literate. To enable these people to receive and spend cryptocurrency there's a serious "last mile" problem that needs solving, and for everyone else there's usually already a better money transfer solution than Western Union, at least for legal transactions.

The developing world might have been impressively advanced adopting tangible digital goods like mobile phone minute allowances as transferable currency, but expecting liquid local markets in a highly volatile cryptographic tokens "mined" in foreign countries where mining rigs and cheap power are available seems like a big ask.

[tyingq]

I was thinking more of something like an entrepreneur bankrolling a BTC to Mpesa gateway.

The main point, though, was that crypto currency isn't a 1:1 replacement for credit cards.

[notahacker]

Agree with your main point, but I think the remittance problem is just as tricky if not more: the BTC MPesa gateway exists (https://www.bitpesa.co/), but so do plenty of reliable low commission ways of converting dollars in the US to MPesa overseas that don't involve exposure to Bitcoin and Bitcoin exchanges