RE: 😨 Grow eyes in the back of your head... 😨
Serious post this time.
One of my biggest bugbears about crypto is how useless it is to actually use it as money. From transaction costs to speed of transactions to the ridiculous units of currency, it's just a waste of time (at the moment).
Just the stupid units thing really annoys me. I've written a post about this before, about how un-user friendly crypto units are which is why it'll never catch on as a replacement for FIAT.
My example was someone selling a car. If it's advertised at $500 USD then I pretty much know the value of it. But what if it's advertised in any of the 1600+ crypto currencies ? Not a clue, would need to be online and looking at an exchange, and a calculator. With USD you could ask anyone in the world what $500 USD was worth and they'd be able to tell you off the top of their head.
Walk into a shop and want to buy a bag of potato chips ?. Thank you mam, that's be 0.00124587 ETH please, or 9.7458432 DUX, or 16.4894156165 BLAH BLAH or something as ridiculous. Utterly useless as currency.
I'd advocate for something that's tied exactly to a dollar, or any other national currency. But instead of mining increasing the value of the coin, the value stays exactly the same but the amount that you own increases. At least you know exactly how much one 'crypto' unit is worth, it's always worth a dollar. You might have 1 of them, or 30,000, but the value never changes.
If crypto doesn't do that, it will forever be in the hands of a few geeks on the internet, and unless you're one of the 5% of people who make money from it, institutional investors who are just going to take it off dumb people all day long, like they do with every other asset that retail traders trade. It will never be adopted as a standard currency by the public.
In which case, whats the point of it in the first place other than just another means for rich people to remove money from poor people ? You can't even buy bread with it ffs.
Ooh no tradergurl! I must strongly disagree! I see what you are saying, allow me to add my 2c worth.
There are several crypto initiatives that aim to address this very problem. Whiel at the core I don't believe it to be a problem, the difficulty in visualising the value of 0.00165243 Litecoin or 4327.3283 Ripple is obvious. Of course this is just a matter of experience: with sufficient exposure, anyone would become as used to dealing in BTC or ETH or LTC as they are in USD or other fiat currencies. I am already about half way there. The sheer number of coins is a problem though, but I assume only a few will eventually rise to the fore as currencies.
I consider linking them to fiat to be a terrible idea! The entire idea of crypto is to replace fiat! It will never do that if people think of it in fiat terms. I want to see a world where people say "How much BTC is my $100.00 worth?" not "how many dollars is my 1 BTC worth?".
The interim solution lies in the use of crypto payment systems, which are already either "there" or "very nearly there". You can already draw crypto funded USD from ATM's with Bitpay. TenX and Monaco will have cards you can swipe like any credit card. You won't have to care about converting your crypto, all you have to do is fund the card from the app, and the mechanics of the conversion will take place in the background. Mobile phone payment solutions like UTrust or Metal will do the same thing, only without the card. You can choose to see dollar value if you wish (my Coinomi multi-currency wallet does that for me for each coin, as do one or two of my other wallets and some exchanges), so you "dollar spending" is already visible to you, even if you're paying in Bitcoin Cash or OmiseGo tokens or whatever else.
I totally agree it needs to be unlinked to FIAT, but the value part needs to usuable. I can't imagine my mother for example, in her late 70's, not be confused by sums of 0.000034523 instead of 0.0000034523.
Don't forget you (and I) are in this tiny tiny minority bubble where we live and breath this kind of stuff, statistically virtually no-one else on the planet buys, uses or understands crypto.We tend to give it more importance than what it's due (in the grand scheme of things). I think I'm about the only person I know out of 100's of people personally that understands what crypto is.
If you ask 100 members of the public, 99 of them would say "Oh, isn't that the computer money thing that people use to buy drugs on the deep web ?". That's what you're facing. We just forget because we're in the middle of it, how little people know, we just assume everyone knows as much as us !
Good point. This is why adoption does not occur overnight. But that's okay, it's why that trendline I love so much continues to slope upwards for a long time to come!
you and your lines... (rolling eyes smiley) lol
...and your line too. If you turn to the dark side!
Never !!! I prefer to make money thanks :-)
😂
...but if you think about it it makes sense...