[avidphantasm]

“People haven’t been transacting in crypto basically at all”

Exactly. When I did a deep dive on crypto currency a few years ago I wondered, what can the transaction rate be for proof of work schemes. Turned out it was less than a dozen per second across an entire network. I don’t think this has changed (https://bitcoinvisuals.com/chain-tx-day). How many transactions does Visa alone do?

[mariojv]

I'm not deep into the cryptocurrency world at all, but a good friend of mine is really into it and has given me a bit of Nano. Transactions are settled nearly instantly on a mobile device, and it relies more on a "proof of stake" than proof of work style system: https://docs.nano.org/whitepaper/english/

I really don't understand how it can be secure and haven't tried to read more into it due to skepticism about cryptocurrency generally, but are non proof of work schemes more viable?

[Ekaros]

I have for years heard about pressuring merchants to accept bitcoin or what ever currency and in the end the number of daily or even monthly users was most often laughably low. Not that there isn't some that move stuff, but that isn't really too many...

[dale_glass]

Crypto basically changed tracks in the last few years.

Initially it was supposed to be money, and so there was a lot of effort to drive adoption. You could buy games on Steam for BTC.

But then a thing happened: the value exploded, and new people started hearing about this amazing new asset growing in value. Crypto became not a coin, but a thing to hoard and sit on, waiting for the price to get higher still.

In this situation, using it as a money is stupid. That pizza somebody bought for 10000 BTC was a terrible loss to the buyer -- they could sell the 100BTC for $634 million today. They shouldn't have bought a pizza, they should have just kept their money in a wallet and done nothing at all with it for a decade.

Given that usage pattern, ability to process transactions doesn't matter. The ideal is one buy at the bottom, and one sell at the peak, possibly years apart. Fees don't really matter, because the transaction is enormous. Paying $5 to move $10 is ridiculous. Paying $5 to move $634 million is a rounding error.

And since Bitcoin was made to be deflationary this pattern of usage is more or less guaranteed. Using it as money is always silly because any newcomers to BTC increase demand and therefore the competition for the supply. And over time, some BTC gets lost, which adds to that as well.

[geitir]

And then 100 years from now it will be worth $5 because no one will care