> Speaking as a young person (22), I'm certainly not embracing cryptocurrencies and neither is anyone I know. Bitcoin is virtually useless as a currency[1] and, having no other compelling use-case whatsoever, cannot really be a store of value either. (Lightning network may change that, but that also amounts to totally replacing almost all of Bitcoin by building a hopefully less shitty system on top of it. Lightning being necessary means that Bitcoin as Satoshi envisioned it has failed utterly.)
Speaking as a merchant selling high value hardware in a world where chargebacks and check fraud make it very hard to run a profitable online sales program... we've accepted more than $10 million in bitcoin for our products and the irreversibly means we don't need any markup for our customers to account for fraud.
It also makes international payments (US to Africa, US to China, US to Europe) almost completely seamless for any counterparty accepting crypto.
For things like cloud storage, you can set up contracts that automatically enforce penalties. No courts, no lawsuits, no backing out of a deal.
The tech is real, the use cases are real, and people are using it today to do things they couldn't do without it. It's super early, but it's going to be bigger than the internet.
>we've accepted more than $10 million in bitcoin for our products and the irreversibly means we don't need any markup for our customers to account for fraud.
I hope you realize the other side of the coin, from the consumer side, is not so great, right? What if you don't deliver the products? Maybe you're a super reputable vendor and people trust you but if you're a little guy selling stuff on ebay good luck convincing me to send you ETH. So much for the distributed currency empowering the little folks to fight against the giants.
There's a reason chargeback exists and that the balance is tipped towards the consumer instead of the vendor in general. It means that the consumer is more likely to consume. That's why even though stone-and-mortar shops could only accept cash and cheques they still use credit card that costs them more, because it's more convenient and makes it more likely for the user to consume. Reduced friction, consumer-guarantees and convenience more than justifies the Visa tax and constraints in many businesses.
In particular it's not something inherent to "fiat", Visa could unilaterally decide to never issue chargebacks for instance. They could also decide to charge the card holder for the transaction cost instead of the vendor. Do you really think that they don't do that because they never thought about it or maybe because there's a more practical reason for not doing things that way?
Speaking as a merchant selling high value hardware in a world where chargebacks and check fraud make it very hard to run a profitable online sales program... we've accepted more than $10 million in bitcoin for our products and the irreversibly means we don't need any markup for our customers to account for fraud.
It also makes international payments (US to Africa, US to China, US to Europe) almost completely seamless for any counterparty accepting crypto.
For things like cloud storage, you can set up contracts that automatically enforce penalties. No courts, no lawsuits, no backing out of a deal.
The tech is real, the use cases are real, and people are using it today to do things they couldn't do without it. It's super early, but it's going to be bigger than the internet.