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…)
The exchanges and miners do have a large influence, but the node runners (the users) have a voice as well. The node runners can get together, and refuse to peopogate the blocks of of the miners/exchanges that are being bad actors (BIP 148 for example) and also (BIP 110) that's currently making the rounds.
If a large enough percentage of the node runners need refuses to propogate a block from a bad actor, then another miner can mine the same block and get the reward.
The miners don't need “node runners” to get access to other miners mined block. That's not how the bitcoin protocol works at all.
In an ideal world the best non-miners can do is prevent some transactions by preventing them to reach the mempool, but you're not going to block an exchange this way either.
The bitcoin protocol is actually very friendly to centralization, the only mechanism that was supposed to prevent it was the PoW, which failed because ASICs exist. And as a result, in practice it's been very centralized for more than a decade now.
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.
As much as some amount of defiance towards contemporary governments is warranted, believing that the crypto world is more trustworthy is an insane take. Especially post MtGox and all what followed…
The Epstein class and the Bankman-Fried class are the same people (and don't get fooled by their patronyms, it has nothing to do with Jews, and all to do with the American elite). And Trump is both an friend of Epstein and a proponent of cryptocurrencies.
Meanwhile with cryptocurrencies you have the choice between getting blocked by your exchange or losing your wallet (from your own negligence or a hack)
You lose your wallet, you make a few phone calls or walk into a bank and get a new card. You lose very little more than some time. Losing your crypto key means you lose your crypto.