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> If buying a hamburger cost you $30 in fees on top of the $6 burger, you'd stop using dollars for everyday purchases, too.

Or maybe you'd buy a few month's worth of burgers.




But then they'd spoil!


I meant as subscriptions.


What an awful limitation. I may not want a burger next week.


OK, Bitcoin-backed debit cards.


Who cares about what they're backed with? If it's not bitcoin, then you don't get the benefits of bitcoin.

The only difference between a normal debit card and a bitcoin-backed debit card is that the bitcoin backing layer is more expensive than the usual one.


You get at least one benefit. You can keep your large-scale financial life as private as you like. Not as well as with the newer privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, of course.

And that was arguably a key goal for Bitcoin. It came up in the shadow of ecash and e-gold. Although it's not as decentralized as many expected, it's also far less vulnerable to government takedown than ecash and e-gold were. But sadly, it's no less vulnerable to speculation than any other small currency has been.




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