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".
