How do you all feel about itch making it possible to pay in crypto, especially Dogecoins?
Crypto is also heavily used by criminals and terrorists to finance their harmful activities. Using crypto makes you guilty of aiding and abetting the criminal establishment, so I would shy away from using Bitcoin, Ethereum... you know, let's burn the dog and his father, too.
What you're thinking about decimating our planet has to do with Non Fungible Tokens or NFTs. They take a crap ton of computing power to create and to sell or exchange, so they cause fossil fuel use to go through the roof when making and exchanging them. I agree. We should outlaw all crypto use and criminalize the usage of such an illicit asset if we wish to save our civilization from heading down to the cesspool. Oh, what do I know about saving the world? I'm just a game developer... :-D
Just to add here, I have to agree with you!
REAL physical money (hard cash) is also used by criminals, WAY even more so than crypto, per $...
...and in terms of resource use / harmful fossil fuel use - normal physical currency (coin minting, cleaning, transporting back and forth, destroying, re-creating, not to mention banknotes, creating, cleaning, destroying etc) - the process for NORMAL currency to be created, and actually used, stored, transported etc ALL uses 'harmful fossil fuel' energy (or worse!) in some form.
I really don't like hearing one-sided arguments, so felt the need to balance this up.
Having said that, to answer your original post - It would be cool, but I still feel that 99% of crypto is WAY too volatile to purchase stuff *without* having the vendor change it to a stable coin once paid in, unless they have a REALLY good feeling about that market, but in terms of @WTF's point about the ecology, I have to disagree, in your favour.
Some people seem terrified of what Crypto can be (ab!)used for, but the fact is that institutions have been able to monitor, dictate, tax, syphon funds, and generally abuse the existing financial markets (and customers), blow BILLIONS on known bad deals / transactions, yet award themselves 100's of millions in bonuses, and track everything *YOU* do, by linking your account, personal details, etc, and following card purchases, payments etc.
This level of monitoring and control is beyond any legitimately required, so it's no surprise that lots of people are embracing the anonymity that crypto transactions and crypto markets in general provide, for completely legitimate reasons.
TL;DR ....So yes, I think crypto currencies ARE the future (if the governments of the world, and banking/financial institutions aren't allowed to outlaw it somehow - and even then.. ;) ), but sadly at present I'd say that it's too volatile to use for everyday purchases - like others also mentioned, the GOOD thing about is is that it generally changes price more rapidly (making it desirable for shorter term investments, vs. historical markets), but then people don't want to spend it if they think it will rise, and don't want to sell it at a loss - it's difficult to justify purchasing stuff with it, rather than exchanging or trading it for other stable coins or crypto... I refer you to that original Bitcoin Pizza purchase.... :)
With all due respect, did you even read my post/comparison?
Hmm... Not that I'm 'triggered', but more trying to educate, so here we go...
1) ...actual paper / physical money / coins do enough to harm the environment - even down to the running of the minting machinery, and the chemicals and processes used to initially create notes and mint coins, let alone destroying old currency, and printing / minting new coins and notes, and to also sanitise and clean (repeatedly, for every single in-circulation coin and note in the wild, over time), administer, transport, etc them. So the only difference is that with physical currency, the environmental impact (while also being high initially), is something that happens again and again, for the life of that currency (in a just as bad for the environment, but FAR more difficult to quantify) manner.
2) ...and in case you're not aware, there are only X number of Bitcoins left to 'mine', and will soon ALL have been mined - it's a finite supply, so once they're mined, no more resources will be used to mint them, and Bitcoin will simply become akin to a normal tradeable commodity.
3) ...add to this the fact that if people are trading on exchanges (as I do), the environmental impact is practically ZERO (Generally no physical blockchain transactions for trading within an exchange)...
4) ...Then add to this, the fact that Ethereum v2, along with BSC, Polygon etc, ALL use very, very low miner / TX resources... (ETH's new POS is INCREDIBLY low, compared to original ETH POW, for example...)
Really, people who don't know enough about crypto currencies, and just repeat baseless or incredibly biased arguments, with NO comparisons to standard currency, are just helping the obviously biased governments, banks and naysayers to spread the mis-information - it's becoming really annoying... (governments think crypto is VERY BAD, unless of course, THEY want to get in on the action by offering their OWN economy's digital equivalent currency - like the UK and other countries are currently trying)...
Look it up, read about it, WITHOUT simply repeating what you hear or are told, from a single biased source, and you'll see that you're simply helping to spread a very biased narrative - I too was concerned when the arguments regarding the (then) ridiculous amount of resources came to light, but things have changed - I read up on it extensively, and I'm now reassured.
People helping out with good causes, ie. running computer simulations on their PC's as part of a cell or farm, for protein folding, together consume an INSANE amount of power / affect the environment, and have been for decades, but I don't hear the same argument! - Heck, I even tried to help by doing this for a while, but the sheer amount of energy it consumed running at 100% CPU 24/7, was simply not affordable - so the exact same principle, compared to older mining requirements...
TL;DR - Read up on it, with an unbiased mindset - you might be surprised... 👍
You are not considering the involved orders of magnitude.
A baseline for comparison is actual money cost to do something. How much does it cost to print a note, how much to mint a coin, how much to cryptomine a unit of cryptocurrency, how much to transfer said cryptocurrency to a new owner.
If you switch to a trust-based wallet system only representing the actual currency you lose all benefits from the cryptocurrency concept. You give control to the wallet company. Effectivly you would exchange transfering intangible online money to transfer intangible online creditpoints. The problem is, that the value that those creditpoints represent have no value at all (actually they represent how much heat you generated by burning other money to pay for your power bill). The value of cryptocurrency exists as a want to be independent of banking and government control. If you shift that to companies, those companies have to comply to laws of the govs they want to operate in. And they will have to act as banks. But to work as intended, the crypto has to be decentralized and independent.
Part of the mining is making transactions happen. Because for the currency to be safe, it has to be not cheap in computational power. There is actually a very deep flaw in design, that you could take over a currency, if you provide 51% of computational power.
All that being said, it is prohibitive to use crypto for small transfers. Just as it is prohibitve to mint 1 cent coins to pay for a car. The cost of say a dollar bill ranges about 5-10 cents and that bill has a life expectancy of 6-20 years. The cost of transfering money is in the vicinity of less than a dollar and a percentage charge. So lets say 30 cent for a dollar and 1 dollar for a 100 dollar transaction as upper bounds.
3 years ago the cost to make a transaction in bitcoin was around 300 bucks in power cost.
As an investment it is too volatile, meaning, yes, you can make a fortune - or lose everything. As a money concept it fails miserably. And please do not compare it to projects like protein folding. Those protein folders do not sweep the market empty making my graphics adapter triple in price, because they put them in display-less computers running them 24/7 "mining" value. They do not mine value, they mine hot air certificates. Quite literally.
Oh, and this warrants an extra reply and totally not because I forgot and did not want to edit:
You claim to know about crypto, but postulate, that bitcoin will just be a normal commodity being traded, once the last coin has been mined.
With that statement you have shown that you know not very much about bitcoin. The currency becomes unusable, literally, should there no more mining be done. It is true, that the coins are finite, but the very design states, that you earn coins by providing computational power to make transactions happen. And that needed power grows, as the currency grows in age. Blockchains are not a good concept to be used on a large scale.
Interesting... ...I'm afraid I have to disagree, and warrant that perhaps YOU do not know as much about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies as you think?
...It's simple. As with any commodity being sold and bought, there is STILL investment already, and trading within, that market, for people to make (and lose) money, even yes, after all Bitcoins have been mined - those in circulation still have value, and are a tradeable commodity...
So regardless of Bitcoin not being a tangible, physical commodity, people are STILL going to buy and sell it, even after all coins are mined. As far as I understand, an inability to mine new coins does not dictate the death of the currency?
In this respect, YES, it will essentially be tradeable as a normal 'finite' supply commodity, for all intents and purposes. It still holds value because there is investment and wealth within the eco-system, people are holding X amount in value of Bitcoin, and people will sell (either at loss, or gain) every day, the exact same way that people trade in finite stock market assets...
Even now, more bitcoins do not need to be mined, for me to trade (and profit from trading it), so why would that stop? - one investor makes a bad call, another profits - it's the way of all investment markets, regardless of having more supply or not...
...and yes, NOTHING is tangible/actual liquidity until you actually sell it, even company stocks and shares, and the same goes for Bitcoin. The value of the commodity, and in the 'stock' so to speak, has been injected / set by the investment level in the 'coin' since its creation.
I know enough to know that the concept in it's foreseeable future will not fly. I does not scale up, it cannot scale up. It has no intrinsic value if used as intended. There is only the bigger fool snowball value. You buy it, because you think you can sell it to a bigger fool. Do not get me wrong, this could work for decades.
The use as intended is to actually pay with the stuff. That was possible in the beginning. There you see the failing in scalabilty. Because after the tech was adopted and people started really using it, even trading it as a commodity, it became literally unusable for it's intended purpose. Decentral money.
The reason it became unusable were and are twofold. The high volatile value due to the commodity trading. And the more important fact that as a crypto currency you have to do crypto and that cannot be cheap. If it were cheap in computation time, it would not be crypto, it would not be safe, you could misuse the decentral design and forge all you want. You need 51% of the computation power in the net to cheat. That is the safe guard. But this very safe guard makes it prohibitve to use. I have to pay for power and hardware to compute for a transaction. For regular money that costs less than a cent. The additional costs are insurance and other stuff and because banks are too pricy. For a crypto currency that costs an ever growing amount of power. The more users you have, the more. You could fine tune, even by orders of magnitude, but a single transaction in bitcoin 3 years ago cost the then power cost of 300 €. I do not know the current price estimates. That costs are not payed directly of course. It is hidden in the commodity trading.
Bitcoin will collapse if the coins are mined. The design of the currency actually had the end of mining in mind, so transaction costs are payed inside the system. You do not mine the new coins, you mine the transactions in a sense, and get payed for that. But think about it, if no one actually uses the currency as a currency, but only as a virtual commodity, the system is dead. Asfarisiknow, if less people do the mining, you also need less computation power. That would be good ... but it would also come with the security risk. If you only need a fraction of the power, you can corrupt the whole system easily.
And a quite big risk is the outright ban of the stuff. Because, at the end of the day, having a thing like bitcoin is like having proof of ownership of a certificate of how much energy you wasted on hot air. Literally. If you have the coin, it is you who paid for the electrical bill. Countries are trying to get green. Adoption of crypto is the opposite. If we can ban ivory, we can ban crypto. And at least the mining of bitcoin is banned in some countrys.
Another risk is the meta inflation. How many "coins" are there currently? It feels like a new one is invented daily.
(Stocks have an intrinsic value or rather, a reason why some people want them. One is voting power in the company. The other is the money you get each year from the shares from the company. If you have no primal users, you cannot have the parasitic trade market. Bitcoin has no primal users. Not anymore. This fact just has not cought up yet to the people trading in it. There are enough people advocating it naivly or with ill intent.)
I have read up on it with an ubiased mindset and that's why I'm against crypto. I used to be for it before I realized how harmful it is to our environment and unstable of a currency. The worth flucuates too much to be reliable and to make crypto our main is to basically doom the Earth (granted capitalism is already destroying it slowly)
Well, this is old, but there are not that many topics, soo
Yes. It would be a bad idea.
It might be a good idea to be more independent of payment methods like paypal. Like accepting credit cards directly, instead of indirectly through paypal. That is, because paypal has arbitrary standards and is not neutral. (Though, I think the devs do can activate credit cards, but opt not to, because they are too expensive. Wich is somewhat disconcerning, because the very same credit card will be billed by paypal for many users. )
But indipendence shoud not be done via crypto. Morality and such things aside, it is the amount of money that prohibits this. Paying coffee money with crypto is just not doable. The transaction cost for small sums is just too high. Many times higher than the sum you want to pay. For bitcoin a few years ago this was in the vicinty of like 300 € for a single transaction in cost of energy due to needed computation power. Crypto means cryptography and de- and encrypting is not for free - it literally can't be, or it would not be crypto. Even if you cut this by factor 100 like Etherium or whatsitname claims, you still have like a few € for a transaction of ... a few € for a cheap indie game. Nope. Not gonna fly.
What might be possible is a wallet system. Microtransactions are just very bad, if you pay directy. Sending 1 buck or sending 100 bucks is the same amount of work. Of course there might be reasons not to have a wallet system, but I think it would be more practically than crypto by far.
There might be legal reasons with vat or age restrictions why anonymous payments would not be viable. GNU Taler is not about microtransactions, though they obviously strife to cover that nieche.
The idea with a wallet system for lack of a better name, is, that instead of many small payments, you make one bigger payment and have the smaller payments be made more easy. Cause at the end of the day, you want to have money transferred onto real banking accounts. And those want money for their service. International money transfer and currency exchange are additional problems.
A defacto implementation is seen locally with many services. Like Steam, if you pay them up front. Then you do not have to transfer money each time for a cheap game. Also seen in many platforms that use "Points" or whatever they call their in-platform currency.
Ideally there would be a service that implements this crossplattform. Paypal could have been such a service, but they suck big time. Foremost because they do not behave neutral, as a payment service should. They impose their own arbitrary restrictions. But in a more practical way, they just relay the money transfer to the real credit card companies. Each itty bitty payment over paypal is a complete transaction on my credit card bill. Waste of transaction cost that could have gone to the developer.
Makes me wonder why there is not such a thing already. People want this. Probably the big fish have not interest, because they tink they can sell more by taking and converting money into points that are easier to spend, because they are not called money.
GNU Taler essentially is a wallet system with minted virtual coins of variable value (and they are not coins in the Bitcoin sense). They can additionally be “tainted” so as to mark age restriction. Here is a more thorough discussion.
In their presentations they quite clearly state that microtransactions is of importance in its design. If you pay with a big coin, the exchange will return a smaller coin worth as much as your change. This is what they call the “refresh protocol”.
I recommend you watch one of their presentations. In some they do a live demo, and frankly I’m shocked this hasn’t been adopted yet.
You are shoked that a half baked project with many wishful thinking and lots of unresolved or inconvenient properties has not been widely or even narrowly adopted?
They can not even exchange currencies. If you have to pay internationally, like on itch for example, and you have € and need to pay in $ you cannot do this with Taler.
And yeah, a problem is, that they call their stuff coins. That was a bad move. Because, as I just said, you do not exchange your prepaid wallet money into Taler Coins. Calling any concept therein coins taints the whole thing with cryptocurrency baggage and all possible early adopters that do not accept "coins" for various reasons will skip it out of principle. (And to make it even more complicated, they actually claim that you exchange your money to their so called coins. But this is not true, as you would have automatic currency exchange this way)
Even the developers freely admit that their project is not ready for real usage.
Imho, they tried to implement too many features. They even offer their wallet as a bitcoin wallet. Or having the wallet only reside on the device. That is a BS concept. I as a User would want something like paypal where I can send money at the ease of sending an email. That service would hold the microtransactions in escrow from both sides, till the escrow sums have accumulated to a big enough sum. The buyer would have to prepay. pp could have offered such a service, but they do not. They evolved into a mere buffer in front of credit card companies. Makes it a little bit easier to accept money, maybe a little bit easier to pay as well, but the fundamental prohibitivness against micro transactions does not change. (Oh, and while they are not cheap, they do offer currency exchange. Comparing prices with the one of your associated credit card is recommended.)
They additionally use the word mint, so I’ll do so, too.
I don’t see why a bank cannot support one Taler exchange for USD and another for EUR. You would then withdraw these mints from your real bank of choice, like you would cash with a physical ATM, and use them wherever. And Bitcoin mints as well, which exist only to show how generic Taler is. Taler itself is not a currency, it is the payment system.
It seems to me you have heavily misunderstood Taler if you think it is not as simple as sending an e-mail. Perhaps going over internal details has confused you. But, suffice it to say, if you want something like PayPal then you do not want anonymity. That is fine, but it is alone no reason to dismiss Taler, which has additional design goals in mind. And it does not explain why a local wallet is a “BS concept”, considering it mirrors the use of cash near-perfectly.
I do not appreciate your tone. It seems to me you have read only a few sentences before dismissing it entirely.
The folks at Taler may not consider it production-ready, but in their own words, “this is not so much because of limitations in the backend, but because we are not aware of a Taler exchange operator offering regular currencies today.” Even so, I think a project developed by a considerable amount of people for 6 years deserves a better descriptor than “half-baked”. I don’t know where this bias of yours lies, but it is not my problem, so I will end it at that.
Of course I overexaggarated. But I did read their own webpages faq and what the thing is supposed to do. And this is the catch. It says what they want to do, what it should do, but not what it can do and what it is. It is wishfull thinking about an ideal service or rather protocol. They try to catch the anonymous payments and while they are at it, the microtransactions as well. Of course , to show their universal applicability, they include the ability to have bitcoins as well in their wallet.
And it is a BS concept, because smartphones get lost or broken and computers get hacked all the time. Electronic cash is not a thing people have trust in. The guys behind the Taler are Germans, they should remember the Geldkarte. It was around for like 25 years. It was cash on a card. Pushed by banks and rather widely accepted. But the only use those got were verifying age when buying cigarettes at a dispenser.
Sure, some anonymity would be nice when giving money to people you do not receive physical goods from. But I need not have that anonymity from the payment processor. They know who I am anyways, because I have to send them the money from real life accounts , like credit card. There is no principal technical barrier from making something like a Steam wallet x-plattform. And regarding micropayments, have a look how the pros do it. They really exchange your money into virtual tokens that you do your microtransactions with. Usually for in-app purchases, but that is another discussion. Regardless, such a service across platforms would implement the microtransactions we want.