imo this is less of a technical issue and more of a regulatory one in 2024. Sending and receiving large amounts of btc/eth for instance might take a minute. For lower value point of sale transactions you don't really have to wait. And that's money in your pocket at that point not an IOU like a pending transaction at a US bank. Paying capital gains on transactions and constantly changing value dampens adoption quite a bit though
It exists in the US as well (Zelle), except due to the super high number of banks, not all will have feature parity / have it enabled. The major banks like Chase support QR code scanning for instant transfers, smaller ones might require a phone number or email input via keyboard.
It will exist soon in the US since FedPay was rolled out this year. It will take a while for banks to support it, but my guess is everyone will support it as replacement to ACH.
I don't think Venmo will die since there is a need for app to provide nice interface. But Zelle has been lobbying against FedPay since it will destroy them.
Vitalik gave goals of 1.33 MB per second in blob space, and a compressed tx size of 25 bytes. This gives around 50,000 transactions per second, which seems like a worthy goal.
I would have sworn I read it in the linked article, but it's sure not there when I read it again. And it's not in the oldest archive.org copy either. I can only conclude I hallucinated it, which makes me uncomfortable.
The reason L2s can scale that high is every machine doesn't have to process every transaction.
Each L2 is its own chain that uses its own sequencer/s. The blocks from this chain are then compressed into a single blob of data with a ZK proof that the transactions are valid. The validators on L1 only need to verify that ZK proof matches the hash of the submitted data, which can be done in a few ms even if the L2 did 1M+ transactions.
Capital gains tax is not a technical issue per se. People also don't buy coffee with wire transfers, but nobody says wire transfers are a failure. btc/eth are better at doing what wire transfers were designed to do. The point is the tech is much better than people who have been sleeping on crypto seem to realize
This was my use case for bitcoin years ago when my wife and I had just got married. She is a foreigner and was finishing school, so I'd sometimes send her bitcoin instead of wire. Back then bitcoin was only worth a few hundred, and sending her a 1-3 hundred a month is what she needed. To wire 300 dollars is simply not worth it, at least back then. I'm not sure if it has changed at all now though.
Something that has likely slowed down adoption: Current payment methods (CC, debit, tap, chip, etc) artificially appear faster than they are.
When someone taps, 99% of the time the payment processor is not waiting for the funds. It’s all trust and calculations of acceptable risk (that’s why the tap limit).
Crypto can adopt that approach as well.
Yes, CCs/debit went through a period (as did cheques) where that trust was wildly abused and it’s likely any trust layer on top of crypto would have to go through the same period of abuse, but solutions [c|w]ould be implemented fairly quickly since it’s all tech.
Yup. eth transactions could happen in the time it takes to run a credit card if you wait for just a couple confirmations, which should be acceptable risk for point of sale. Bitcoin has lightning.
As to your last point: credit card fraud is still rampant and hardly anyone accepts checks outside of contractual b2b transactions. The issues with those technologies are technical in nature. Sending a crypto transaction doesn't allow someone to fraudulently charge your account like those technologies do. Whether chargebacks should even exist in a secure transaction system by default is debatable. I personally don't think that kangaroo court service is worth the fraud + global ~3% fees. Think about all the chargebacks you've made in your life that weren't related to credit cards just being insecure. I'm certain they are not worth 3% of your total spending.
Wire Transfers are a logistic service you may have someone perform for you in exchange for cash.
Half the point of a digital cash is that you never need a wire transfer because you can just exchange the digital cash directly. Effectively the same as handing someone an envelope full of physical cash.
The currency exchange step needed to convert that BTC back into real money is probably more annoying than just dealing with a wire transfer. And that is essentially my point. If you send someone USD, they can use that directly to pay for expenses like food or rent. If you send someone BTC, they need to first convert that into a real currency before they can use it. That is what I am referencing when I say "The 'Killer App' for a cryptocurrency would be the ability to use it as a currency".
I don't want instant transactions. Clawbacks are very useful. Now the trick is to get that decentralized which means things like smart contracts? But still I haven't seen a good solution.
Well everyone pays an extra ~3% on all of their transactions for that privilege, plus whatever costs retailers factor in for rampant credit card fraud. I wouldn't consider Visa the gold standard of how financial transactions should work the whole system is very clunky and prone to abuse.
I'm really surprised sellers aren't trying to use it at all. There was a small push awhile ago ~2015/16 where a bunch of online stores started accepting bitcoin but IIRC they all stopped once the BTC/USD started to decrease.
I guess credit card fees are <4% so there might not be a big enough discount to offer consumers to make them figure out how to get crypto (without paying more than 4% fees somewhere). Perhaps a chargeback heavy industry such as porn or political groups could benefit from non-chargebackable transactions.
The high bitcoin fees killed adoption more than the price drop.
I worked on OpenBazaar, a decentralized marketplace using bitcoin, and no one wants to spend $5 just to buy something. Artificially reducing block sizes killed adoption.
"Bitcoin but its anonymous" does not make Monero a real currency.
I guess it helps that its value is relatively stable.
But I still can't realistically use it. I can't walk in a store, buy something, then pay with Monero which is obviously disqualifying on it's own. But in addition to that, if I want to give a friend some Monero I would have to walk them through making a new account with some new app which they won't do because it's pointless anyways.
"I can't realistically use credit cards. I can't walk in a store and pay using my credit card. And if I want to send some money to my friend, I have to walk them through of opening a bank account which they won't do because it's pointless anyway and I can just hand them the $50 dollar bill" - Someone years ago.
Do you expect every store to start accepting it instantly?
Your argument does not disqualify Monero as a real currency. It is a real currency, it's used every day for transactions. Just because you don't find use for it in your life does not disqualify it.
Monero is nine years old, Bitcoin is fifteen years old.
I looked up the history of the credit card on Wikipedia to see how fast that caught on. It seems it had a slow start as well. Things only changed when a big bank put all of its weight behind it. I don;t think something like that will ever happen with cryptocoins, since there are no big institutions that would benefit from it becoming widespread.
> I can't realistically use credit cards. I can't walk in a store and pay using my credit card
That was true at some point and I would agree that as long as it remained true "Why should I carry a credit card that I can't use anywhere?" would be a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
> And if I want to send some money to my friend, I have to walk them through of opening a bank account which they won't do because it's pointless anyway and I can just hand them the $50 dollar bill"
This is completely disconnected from reality. People very commonly use bank accounts and checks. I know they must exist but I cant think of a single person in my life who would need my help dealing with a check.
> It is a real currency, it's used every day for transactions. Just because you don't find use for it in your life does not disqualify it.
You could say the same thing about V Bucks but that doesn't make it a real currency.
> That was true at some point and I would agree that as long as it remained true "Why should I carry a credit card that I can't use anywhere?" would be a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
But using it as an argument against credit cards is dumb.
> People very commonly use bank accounts and checks
Yes, now they do. Used to be that most people held their wealth in gold or literal cash.
> You could say the same thing about V Bucks but that doesn't make it a real currency.
V Bucks (to my knowledge) can only be used to buy Fortnite stuff. Can I even send it to anyone I want? Guessing not. And I'm pretty sure I can't sell it on a market to anyone else either.
It's maybe quick with low fees now while no one is using it.
It has the exact same practical problems every other distributed cryptocurrency has preventing it from being useful as an actual currency. If Monero ever started seeing adoption as an actual currency it would fall apart just like Bitcoin.
I can't walk into a store and pay with USD either. It doesn't mean USD is not a currency, it's just not usually accepted by stores in my country.
I use Monero semi-regularly to pay for things online (usually privacy products, because sadly nobody is interested in selling me groceries in exchange for xmr). You can absolutely buy things with it.
