[jeletonskelly]

Ok, but what problem is cryptocurrency solving exactly? I'm already making day to day payments with USD, so why do I want to do it with cryptocurrency? If the entirety of the value of cryptocurrency as a problem solver is that people have to accept the New World Order evil banksters conspiracy theory then it's already dead.

[cc81]

Yeah, that is the problem.

I can buy something from China and pay without any problems. I can send money to my friend using my phone. I can transfer money quickly to a trading platform and buy some stock.

Sending money around and paying for things is easy today and Bitcoin does not make that easier for me. And while I guess a total collapse of the world could happen I feel that it is more likely Bitcoin collapses than Mastercard and my 200 year old bank (that is somewhat backed by my government).

I guess the thing Bitcoin has going for it for some people is buying drugs online but even there I've read that there is considerable resources thrown at monitoring the blockchain to identify buyers and sellers.

[chrisco255]

Are you kidding me? It can take 7 days or more to transfer large amounts of cash around between accounts.

You may be able to buy from China on credit but you can't just move cash around willy nilly. Even debit card transactions take a day or two to clear.

But good luck opening a $25K stock trading account (from cash) in less than 7 days.

[1001101]

I remember reading about 147M$ bitcoin transfer (~195k BTC, would be much more today). [1] As the reference says:

"On the bitcointalk forums, some users were less interested in the owners’ identity and more impressed by the infrastructure that allowed such an amount to be transferred without any regulatory hindrance, lawyers, or fees (the user paid no transaction fee at all). Even handing over that amount in hard cash would be a logistical challenge."

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/194993-btc-transaction-147m-mystery...

[hiyer]

Liu Yiqian paid $170 million on his credit card once [1]. Presumably the transaction was instantaneous. As an added bonus he also got free first class travel for self and family for life because of the points accrued. For those who can afford it BTC is by no means the only way to make such transactions quickly.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/24/billionaire-ea...

[CaptainZapp]

I'd wager that's because America has a rather antiquated banking system.

Moving funds between banks in the EURO area is virtually instantenous and practically free.[1]

And good luck opening any stock trading account with crypto currencies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Euro_Payments_Area

[ghthor]

And all the crypto hype that burning inside me is that as an engineer and a technologist its frustrating as hell that our banking system is so danm antiquated. Crypto for me is a manifestation of thousands of frustrated engineers saying, we can do better and technology is powerful, stop holding us back.

[cc81]

I live in Sweden and it is much quicker. I just transferred some money between my bank and Avanza which is one of the largest stock trading sites in Sweden. You have two options:

1. "Direct deposit", all largest banks in Sweden support it and that means that the money is transferred real time. That service is open between 7am and 11pm at Avanza.

2. Normal bank transfer and that takes one day in Sweden.

Source in Swedish but you could translate it: https://www.avanza.se/kundservice.html/281/vad-ar-direktinsa...

Avanza does not have a limit on how much money you can transfer but your bank might have, in that case you might have to rise that limit if you want to transfer a lot.

I don't know if it takes a day or two or clear (or more) if I buy from China but from my perspective it is usually an incredibly smooth checkout and I will get my stuff x amount of weeks later if I'm cheap with transport costs.

[buboard]

i dont think its possible to make an international bank transfer in 1 day. Maybe through SEPA (not sure? ) but that's just inside the EU.

Also, how are fees in sweden ? bank transfer/currency exchange fees are just an absurd abuse of power imho.

[jddj]

I recently moved a fair sum of money between two countries where no EU-style agreements exist.

I used regular money and went through a fairly well-known fintech company who specializes in this type of thing, and I think the whole process only took around 6 hours.

From memory it cost around 0.5% of the transfer value, and gave me the true mid-market rate.

We're not truly living in a world where it's Bitcoin or we stay completely at the mercy of the banks (w.r.t sending money across borders, at least), and the banks will catch up to where the fintech is - much like Travel Agents, they're just still successfully arbitraging their incumbency against the knowledge (w.r.t technology and the other options available) level of the general population.

[buboard]

depends on the country. you re lucky you live in a good one, i live in one of the worst.

[cc81]

Sure, this is within Sweden.

[buboard]

Then you re exaggerating it. Yuo can't even do that between EU countries, which are literally a single market. Imagine spending your next mediterranean vacation with just your Swish app, you 'd probably starve. The thing is, whatever good infrastructure sweden has built, it will take a looong time for similar tech to be adopted throughout much of the world (and i m pretty certain it will meet a mountain of resistance from rent-seeking banks). Instead, cryptos only require that the other party can download a wallet app, which is arguably easier.

[1001101]

> (that is somewhat backed by my government)

I think you've identified one of the advantages of bitcoin. There's no counterparty risk, ie bail-ins. This is the commodity gold replacement use case where the carry on Bitcoin is lower and paid by others.

[cc81]

Yes, but I can loose all my Bitcoin pretty easy if I lack security or if I trust someone else to hold my money and they get hacked or do an exit scam.

I feel that that scenario is much more likely than the collapse of my country and bank.

[al_chemist]

> I can loose all my Bitcoin pretty easy if I lack security

Those are interesting times. We trust government more than we trust ourselves.

[1001101]

Depends on where you live, I guess. Bitcoin is popular in Venezuela.

[bdcravens]

There's a class of problems it can solve. The problem is that most people who buy it don't have those problems.

[buboard]

that's not the real problem though. Problem is that those people don't care to use it as currency (which would increase its actual value), so it has turned to a speculative game for whales.

[SlowRobotAhead]

I'm fond of calling it what it really is. A cryptocommodity. There is nothing currency about it right now, too volatile to trust on either the seller or buyer's end.

[buboard]

not even. if one wants to invest for the long term in a commodity, they d pick gold, for the simple reason that it won't rust. Bitcoin may fold tomorrow if a cryptographic weakness is found, its just too risky to be an investment grade commodity. But since it's not a currency either, it has become just a game for speculators, and it will remain so until the people who actually need the tech start puttting it to use en masse.

[lowdest]

This is the truth.

[buboard]

i would like to give my users the option to do microtransactions that they won't have to think twice, and it won't take them 20 minutes to sign up to some payment service with all their personal info disclosed . I would even like them to give each other small tips for their effort in a way that can be cashed-out. basically the equivalent of cash. that is impossible in today's web without becoming a major accounting hassle.

apart from solving some of today's problems, bitcoin (OK, not bitcoin, some better cryptocoin) is creating new markets and opportunities

[gizmo686]

The problem is that once a cryptocurrency starts to demonstrate such a market, there is nothing stopping Visa from rolling out a microtransaction fee structure and undercutting the cryptocurrency.

[buboard]

well great, but visa has a lot of liabilities too. Being centralized, they become e.g. liable for illegal transactions, where cryptos dont have that. This has costs, which should normally never allow visa to be competitive.

also, tbh , visa launching a microtransaction framework as easy to use as cryptos would be great news

[cjhopman]

> as easy to use as cryptos would be great news

...

[buboard]

if there was something as easy (or easier) i would use it. any suggestions?

[lalaland1125]

Cryptocurrency solves the problem of enabling illegal transactions. Child pornography, drug trade, extortion, and illegal gambling are all currently being solved with cryptocurrency.

[buboard]

not if you have the option to use cash for these activities. cash is more versatile and untraceable for this kind of things.

[stale2002]

The problem that it is solving is censorship resistant financial transactions.

Perhaps that is not a problem you have to deal with in your life, and that would make you fortunate.

But there are literally billions of people in the world who live under authoritarian regimes.

And so far, we have yet to see any successful attempt by any government to engage in market wide censorship of these financial transactions.

Someone will inevitably claim that shutting all this down is easy, and yet it hasn't happened yet, so the real life facts prove them wrong.

[jeletonskelly]

How are people in these repressed regimes supposed to buy bitcoin then?

[stale2002]

These people already do so now. They exchange good and services or other forms of money, in exchange for someone sending crypto to their crypto wallet.

Many people in repressed countries like China and Venezuela are already able to aquire crypto. People in China are among the largest holders of crypto, actually.

This is not some hypothetical question. We can observe the answer to your question, right now, through the people that are using it.

[chrisco255]

Hey...can I borrow $1 from you? I don't want to sign up for some service or create a bank account or anything heavy like that...I just want to borrow $1. I promise to pay you back $1.10 in one week.

How would you facilitate the extremely simplistic example I listed above with USD?

[extragood]

The biggest thing for me is that cryptocurrency improves every non-cash payment that you make.

To pay for something without cash, you have to use a service: whether it's a credit card, Paypal, Square, Stripe, Google Wallet, Apple Pay, etc. (if you're not using cryptocurrency). At minimum, there's a bank involved. That means every transaction goes through a payment processor who collects their share of the transaction value, whether it's taken from the end-customer or the merchant. Generally the merchant "eats" the cost which is then in turn reflected in higher prices.

Cryptocurrency is decentralized, meaning that there is no middleman company that profits off of every transaction, and that's better for consumers and business. It's more efficient. And I dislike bank and credit card executives. They're pretty scummy.

The problem with cryptocurrency is that many early adopters hoarded their coin collections rather than spend them, thereby creating artificial scarcity, which in turn raised the price beyond any semblance of reason.

The market determines the value of the coin, and investors don't have a good sense of what the real value should be - assuming that we aren't witnessing the demise of Bitcoin et al. right now.

[redial]

I do not know much about Bitcoin or other crypto coins, but how can it be more efficient if it takes on average[1] almost an hour for a transaction to be validated? Credit card, Apple Pay, Ali Pay, etc. are instant.

[1] https://coincentral.com/how-long-do-bitcoin-transfers-take/

[andirk]

Credit cards are not instant. They take several days before they post. And you can spend more USD in your bank account than is actually there up to a certain extent, causing "overdraft" (if you allow it). The hour that you wait for BTC is to make sure it can't be taken back. A credit card transaction can even be taken back after it has completely cleared called a "chargeback".

BTC is actually instant. You don't even need internet access! But to make sure it can't be taken back, we wait an hour.

[sshine]

There was a quote by Andreas Antonopoulos (Mastering Bitcoin) saying something about the cost vs. risk and how you can afford to sell a cup of coffee instantly without fearing a double-spend attack. You might wait for one or two blocks to be confirmed before you sell a laptop. That scales exponentially for six blocks being so expensive to double-spend past that it'd cost you a hangar ship.

[buboard]

there are alternative coins that are much faster. plus there are many of them, so if a blockchain is slow, people will theoretically be able to switch to another. having 3-4 different coins in our digital wallets doesn't seem like its going to be a huge hassle, especially if it is going to be easy to exchange between them.

[sshine]

Smaller coins are very inexpensive to double-spend.

There was someone on hacker news some months back who collected donations to proof-of-concept abuse one or more.

So a safer alternative would be a token coin on Ethereum, since you're not actually switching to a microscopic, unknown and thus abusable blockchain.

[bdcravens]

> Credit card, Apple Pay, Ali Pay, etc. are instant.

Not really. There's a settlement period, and if the transaction can be reversed, it's really not complete in the sense of a Bitcoin transaction with 6 confirmations.

[timcederman]

That's a deliberate (and extremely useful) feature.

[redial]

The transaction may not be truly completed, but it was validated instantly.

[bdcravens]

Which in Bitcoin's case, would be a 0-confirmation transaction, which is visible pretty much immediately as well.

[redial]

0-confirmation seems to be just a placeholder, so I do not think it is comparable at all to a credit card verification.

I do not want to nitpick but credit cards validate, that is to say they verify the parts in a transaction and resolve instantly if it can or cannot take place, and then it does take place instantly. That you can "take it back" is a feature independent of the actual operation. The settlement period is not a technological imposition but a human one; it is in place because humans are not trustworthy.

On Bitcoin on the other hand, the limitation is inherently technical. The protocol verification methods are slow by design.

[gizmo686]

> Cryptocurrency is decentralized, meaning that there is no middleman company that profits off of every transaction,

Except for the miners, who get a transaction fee on every transaction.

[mrep]

Don't forget the new coins being mined which have to be immediately sold to pay the $2.7 billion dollar operating cost [0] to secure the network. It should come as no surprise that the price of bitcoin has fallen so much and peak mining capacity has fallen by 30% when you have $2.7 billion dollars worth of newly generated bitcoin supply being sold each year.

[0]: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

[bdcravens]

What percentage of online merchants take Bitcoin directly, without using a third-party?

[buboard]

> every transaction goes through a payment processor

the scary part is that every embarassing little transaction has to go through multiple such processors, wiith most of them taking a cut basically because they are rent-collectors.

[dna_polymerase]

> Ok, but what problem is cryptocurrency solving exactly?

Simple. It enables payments, to be more precise: Online Payments. Now you could do those using your credit card (like most people in the US do, or basically all of Scandinavia). That is, if you are able to open an account with a bank, and being issued a CC. However, this is not possible for many people. Outside the western world banking isn't available to the same extent as it is there.

In a world where more and more commerce moves online - thus enabling whole new businesses and economies - we can't afford to just let people behind. Speaking for Ethereum now, banking the Unbanked is a centrepiece of the project.

Also, wire-transfer isn't free in some places of the world, some projects seek to eliminate those fees entirely or reduce them to peanuts effectively.

It's basically democratising online payments and giving people access. Also some projects (like ZCash and Monero) seek to bake in privacy into payments, which is nice given that all Credit Card payments are recorded by private companies. I don't know about you but I already dislike online advertising, I don't want some company to know about everything about my payments.

[malmsteen]

So criminals and "not yet developped" people living inplaces where they dont have a good banking systemp but are somehow educated enough to use bitcoin.

Lol

[CaptainZapp]

Actually the people living in underbanked areas are pretty well served by mobile payment systems.[1]

Of course that's not completely anonymous and can't necessarily be used for dodgy stuff (there are certain KYC requirements) but it seems to server the developing world a whole lot better than crypto currencies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa