I was talking to someone running an ecommerce site, they also run their own lighning nodes and there's many reasons:
- High risk customers that the shop can accept if there's no chargeback option. For these users that are excluded from many ecommerce shops that's a good option and they are willing to jump through some hoops
- Customers from countries that are restricted from using VISA / Mastercard
- People from countries with active sanctions against.
People in other countries trying to buy stuff from US ecommerce sites. A number of payment processors really don't care about them, and simply will not let customers from there buy using a credit card.
Just this week I couldn't purchase from Walmart.ca with a CAD denominated card for delivery to Canada, because my billing address was not in Canada or the US.
This has tradfi banking ramps. You don't need to hold it. You can treat BTC as basically a payment network instead of something like the visa/mastercard cartel.
afaict, the main advantages of buying things with crypto are (potentially) lower transaction fees and latencies, and less red tape restricting who can buy what from whom. If you use a "tradfi onramp", doesn't it negate all of that? Why not just use tradfi all the way, for that transaction?
There is no requirement to use the tradfi ramps. It is merely offered as an option. But as it pertains to banking in the USA, a couple differentiating qualities I will offer before the goalposts will inevitably be shifted yet again to damn my response
1) Settlement time (wires only sporadically free in US, plus usually settle slower)
2) Irreversibility.
3) The tradfi ramps, if used, only have to be OK with crypto ramp, rather than the whole host of underlying transactions. It is conceivable some banks will tolerate crypto while not tolerating, say, directly handling a particular transaction.
This was thr original intent of thr Satoshi paper, except BTC is probably the worst payment network you can think about, which is why it failed to gain any use as such over the past 18 years…
I sent a transfer from the UAE to Spain and another one to the Netherlands. They took 5 days and 7 days respectively.
The same transfer takes 10 minutes in Bitcoin.
You don't do transfers to pay for stuff at the grocery store, the same way you would not pay using the Bitcoin network. You would use lightning network, which takes less than 2 seconds finality.
That usage is not a generic payment usage. This is a use case it is good for. But if 8 billion people should use Bitcoin for their everyday shopping, that is a totally different case...
Well you wouldn't use Bitcoin itself to exchange on, you'd use side layers like Lightning payments for the near instantaneous exchange which then gets aggregated into one of the upcoming blocks.
MasterCard was around in the 1950's, in 2026 they do not still use the same method of exchanging money as they did back then and have had to make big changes to their systems as time has gone on, Bitcoin does the same thing except it's not controlled by a banking cartel but by all it's userbase.
> except it's not controlled by a banking cartel but by all it's userbase.
Bitcoin is absolutely not controlled by its user base, but by another cartel (made of mining pools and exchanges). You, as a user have literally no say in any decisions taken by bitcoin except voting with your feet, which is exactly what you're suggesting against Visa & MasterCard's (which aren't banks by the way…)
It's nice to have the option either way, but if merchants offer irreversible methods I usually pick them rather than pay a 1+% premium to cover chargebacks from scammer customers. For some customers irreversible is a big plus, if they trust the merchant.
A former tech giant that has seen its dominance being swallowed by competitors and now cornered into numismatist and other collectible.
Sure it's a very profitable company for its inveators, but a friend of mine used to work there until recently and he used to describe it as a dead shell that merely lives out of rent-seeking on its legacy.
Good luck attracting investors if you have the same business plan today.
Only if they're on the receiving end. You need to remember that businesses also buy things, and often by credit card.
Chargebacks exist in the real world because long, long ago people recognized that electronic payment systems are fertile soil for scammers. The "lack of chargeback risk" that cryptobros keep chirping about is nowhere near the flex they think it is.
It's a flex when you compare it to a government based currency where the bank or government can freeze your bank accounts or just empty it.
Plenty of stories from The USA and Canada from the last decade of that very thing being done.
Sure. The vast majority of those stories being the freezing of proceeds from criminal activity or funds that are part of a legal dispute and for which there is a high probability that the holder of those funds will attempt to illegally hide or move those funds.
Again, this is by design. Such safeguards exist for a good reason. They are tools that are as necessary as a policeman's gun. Yes, they are tools that can be (and have been) abused and for which there should also be guardrails and oversight in place. But saying that crypto is better than "government based currency" because crypto has no such safeguards in place is the same thing as saying Wal Mart security officers are better than police officers because they don't carry guns. It is a naive thought at best.
Meanwhile with cryptocurrencies you have the choice between getting blocked by your exchange or losing your wallet (from your own negligence or a hack)
- High risk customers that the shop can accept if there's no chargeback option. For these users that are excluded from many ecommerce shops that's a good option and they are willing to jump through some hoops
- Customers from countries that are restricted from using VISA / Mastercard
- People from countries with active sanctions against.