[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.