Meta shareholders rejected the Bitcoin plan with less than 1% in favour. The proposal called Bitcoin a hedge against inflation and weak bonds. GameStop and Metaplanet are among firms copying Saylor’s Bitcoin play.
I had an acquaintance ask me about my opinion on crypto a few years ago and I explained it only has the perceived value and is highly volatile as a result, and that all but a few coins were basically rug pulls waiting to happen. He was satisfied with that and moved on. About a year later crypto had roughly doubled in value and he gave me shit about bad advice (it was an opinion not investment advice) and proceeded to move $10k into some coin I’d never heard of. About a month later a mutual friend said the other guy had lost like $8k of his $10k investment. Next time I saw the acquaintance there was no mention of crypto.
It’s not, but there are plenty of crypto scams. It’s not an investment and it’s also not a particularly good store of value, but it is decent for P2P transactions, with some coins also providing privacy.
If that’s not your use case, don’t buy cryptocurrencues. Most people shouldn’t buy them until more places accept them for payment.
That is not what’s stopping people from paying for things in bitcoin. When you buy something in BTC you pay the equivalent to whatever you would have paid in the local fiat. And on the vendor side, merchant services often convert that paid BTC into fiat in the moment after the sale. Both parties are insulated from volatility in the context of the exchange. What actually keeps people from paying for day to day goods and services in BTC is Gresham’s Law, the observation that nobody wants to pay for purchases with an appreciating asset, so long as there’s also a depreciating asset they could pay with instead.
I don’t know what you’re saying. If I charge a particular amount for a loaf of bread and then the cryptocurrency value drops halfway through the day then that person still has the bread but I now don’t have the money.
The whole point of currency is to get away from the fluctuating value of exchange that everyone had to deal with when we used to buy things with gold and semi-precious stones.
Vendors can immediately sell upon receipt. And prices rarely change that much in a day, usually it’s a few percent at most (within the credit card fee range), especially for the currencies targeted at actually being currencies instead of scams.
Most vendors do frequently sell or convert to stablecoins to avoid this problem, and in times of uncertainty, they often charge more to cover the eventual losses
I believe you don’t hold massive stacks of cash under your bed, though you might occasionally withdraw cash.
I also believe you don’t keep all your money on your normal bank account. You invest some, as investing is better in some situations.
Well, for crypto it’s the same. Sometimes it’s better to pay in crypto, like in situations where you don’t want to be tracked because you’re privacy concious, or maybe because you don’t trust or hate banks, or because you like the technology and want to see it develop, or because of international payment/transfer fees, or because your economy is overinflated (like in poorer countries)…
You can also decide to take the potential risks and hold the crypto, or just swap to a stablecoin. Stores prefer switching to fiat to simplify their legal declarations, have clear incomes and expenses. They just accept crypto because customers want to pay with it.
That happens to every currency, BTC is more volatile than many, but things can be priced.
Also until twiddling is made illegal, prices can be set by some other currency or some function, and be calculated in BTC from that, and displayed on electronic price tags for example.
Never gonna happen is a bit of a stretch. It used to be a thing. Steam accepted bitcoin. They stopped accepting it due to volatility and high transaction fees at the time. You still price things in your local currency but convert at checkout. There are “plug and play” payment processors who can handle it now… Spar in Switzerland accepts it.
But imo, its not something regular people should be using anyway.
I thought your point was it was never happening? I provided examples where it did happen in the past and where its happening now. Volatility of the price vs USD is not the biggest issue if the payment processor gives the vendor USD back after the transaction. If the vendor believes in crypto, they can decide to keep it as well. Had Valve chosen to hold their crypto earnings in 2016 for a few years, they’d have seen even larger profits. But thats beside the point. I personally believe they canned it more because of transaction fees. At the time, bitcoin network was oversaturated due to an explosion of popularity which reduced it to unusable levels for everyday transactions.
You should be focusing on why other vendors are still supporting crypto and asking yourself why.
Fees are predictable. Volatility is not. If you can’t make sure the money you are paid retains its value then the price you are selling something for is also volatile rather than inert.
I like GNU Taler, and I would like there to exist not just such a payment system, but also an electronic currency system without blockchains (global synchronization is a pain), unfortunately currencies are not like most applications.
I also wrote two smartass paragraphs completely wrong after this, and now thinking about it - Taler is as good a solution as possible. It’s basically what can be done. You can’t decentralize an issuer or a bank, except for the BTC way. If you can, then you can’t plug it in seamlessly , you need some synchronization (would be a shame if a failed transaction made it into Taler as passed).
If I understand that correctly.
Gosh. It’s year 2025, I’ve achieved nothing. I was blabbering on these subjects in year 2011! I’ll be 29 in less than a month. But so cool that someone is making the humanity better.
Taler is cool, but it solves a completely different set of problems vs cryptocurrencies, and is ripe for being replaced with alternatives, undermining its primary purpose.
Here are a few of the problems being solved here:
transaction fees
privacy
decentralization
independence from fiat
Taker largely attacks the first two, and cryptocurrencies largely attack the second two, and I’m mostly interested in the middle two. However, since Taler doesn’t do either of the last two, it’s subject to either being ignored (i.e. if no banks are willing to support it) or directly competed against with something that sacrifices one of the first two, and customers won’t get the option of Taler.
I think Taler makes a ton of sense for something with its own currency, such as microtransactions or a browser extension for rewarding creators (say, in lieu of displaying ads). I don’t see benefits for banks who make a ton from credit cards. There are some cryptocurrencies that hit the last three (e.g. Monero), so that’s what I’m excited to see take off.
Y’all should have bought BTC when the price was hovering around $19K about 3 years ago. I told you the price was going to go up, but no one listened. Now it’s at $105K, I’m $60k richer, and y’all are still whining and complaining that it’s a “scam”.
Hate to break it to you, but bitcoin isn’t to crash and burn anytime soon. It’s still early; buy in now or regret it for the rest of your life.
The point did fly over your head, you’re right about that. Pointing at the current value of your scam investment as proof of it not being a scam does not make it legitimate.
What argument? You pointed to the price of bitcoin going up and I pointed out that scams go up in value. Then you think it doesn’t apply to bitcoin because…? Oh, that’s right, you didn’t make any argument other than “number went up”.
Even the “legit” parts are only used by people to try to get richt from it. It isn’t a currency and won’t ever be.
And as an investment it is bad. At least with real investments the company actually uses the money to improve. Crypto is nothing more than a sock under your bed.
They’re the same with AI. Had these people been interested years ago, they would be sitting pretty. But they kept telling everyone it’s garbage. Now it’s just sunk costs for them
I mean if I found a wallet with a million euros worth of bitcoin, I’d sell half and keep half. If it rises significantly, sell half of the remainder. And so on.
If I found a wallet with like 5k worth of BTC on it though? Just sell it all right away, it’ll do more for me now than say 10k in 5 years which is an insane long term return tbf.
BECAUSE CRYPTO IS A SCAM
I had an acquaintance ask me about my opinion on crypto a few years ago and I explained it only has the perceived value and is highly volatile as a result, and that all but a few coins were basically rug pulls waiting to happen. He was satisfied with that and moved on. About a year later crypto had roughly doubled in value and he gave me shit about bad advice (it was an opinion not investment advice) and proceeded to move $10k into some coin I’d never heard of. About a month later a mutual friend said the other guy had lost like $8k of his $10k investment. Next time I saw the acquaintance there was no mention of crypto.
Yeah, it’s like those people who fall for ads where people get rich going to the casino.
i notice that is usually conservatives that buys into the scam, and the ones that peddle it too.
It’s not, but there are plenty of crypto scams. It’s not an investment and it’s also not a particularly good store of value, but it is decent for P2P transactions, with some coins also providing privacy.
If that’s not your use case, don’t buy cryptocurrencues. Most people shouldn’t buy them until more places accept them for payment.
It’s not going to happen. You can’t price things when the value of the currency changes every 10 minutes.
That is not what’s stopping people from paying for things in bitcoin. When you buy something in BTC you pay the equivalent to whatever you would have paid in the local fiat. And on the vendor side, merchant services often convert that paid BTC into fiat in the moment after the sale. Both parties are insulated from volatility in the context of the exchange. What actually keeps people from paying for day to day goods and services in BTC is Gresham’s Law, the observation that nobody wants to pay for purchases with an appreciating asset, so long as there’s also a depreciating asset they could pay with instead.
You’re aware we just use the conversion price in fiat, right?
I don’t know what you’re saying. If I charge a particular amount for a loaf of bread and then the cryptocurrency value drops halfway through the day then that person still has the bread but I now don’t have the money.
The whole point of currency is to get away from the fluctuating value of exchange that everyone had to deal with when we used to buy things with gold and semi-precious stones.
Vendors can immediately sell upon receipt. And prices rarely change that much in a day, usually it’s a few percent at most (within the credit card fee range), especially for the currencies targeted at actually being currencies instead of scams.
This ^
Most vendors do frequently sell or convert to stablecoins to avoid this problem, and in times of uncertainty, they often charge more to cover the eventual losses
What is the point of using them if you are expected to switch them to an actual real fiat just to keep your value?
Well, you said it: using crypto.
I believe you don’t hold massive stacks of cash under your bed, though you might occasionally withdraw cash.
I also believe you don’t keep all your money on your normal bank account. You invest some, as investing is better in some situations.
Well, for crypto it’s the same. Sometimes it’s better to pay in crypto, like in situations where you don’t want to be tracked because you’re privacy concious, or maybe because you don’t trust or hate banks, or because you like the technology and want to see it develop, or because of international payment/transfer fees, or because your economy is overinflated (like in poorer countries)…
You can also decide to take the potential risks and hold the crypto, or just swap to a stablecoin. Stores prefer switching to fiat to simplify their legal declarations, have clear incomes and expenses. They just accept crypto because customers want to pay with it.
That happens to every currency, BTC is more volatile than many, but things can be priced.
Also until twiddling is made illegal, prices can be set by some other currency or some function, and be calculated in BTC from that, and displayed on electronic price tags for example.
Never gonna happen is a bit of a stretch. It used to be a thing. Steam accepted bitcoin. They stopped accepting it due to volatility and high transaction fees at the time. You still price things in your local currency but convert at checkout. There are “plug and play” payment processors who can handle it now… Spar in Switzerland accepts it.
But imo, its not something regular people should be using anyway.
The fact that they stopped due to volatility kind of proved my point.
I thought your point was it was never happening? I provided examples where it did happen in the past and where its happening now. Volatility of the price vs USD is not the biggest issue if the payment processor gives the vendor USD back after the transaction. If the vendor believes in crypto, they can decide to keep it as well. Had Valve chosen to hold their crypto earnings in 2016 for a few years, they’d have seen even larger profits. But thats beside the point. I personally believe they canned it more because of transaction fees. At the time, bitcoin network was oversaturated due to an explosion of popularity which reduced it to unusable levels for everyday transactions.
You should be focusing on why other vendors are still supporting crypto and asking yourself why.
Never happening doesn’t mean they don’t try.
Fees are predictable. Volatility is not. If you can’t make sure the money you are paid retains its value then the price you are selling something for is also volatile rather than inert.
I like GNU Taler, and I would like there to exist not just such a payment system, but also an electronic currency system without blockchains (global synchronization is a pain), unfortunately currencies are not like most applications.
I also wrote two smartass paragraphs completely wrong after this, and now thinking about it - Taler is as good a solution as possible. It’s basically what can be done. You can’t decentralize an issuer or a bank, except for the BTC way. If you can, then you can’t plug it in seamlessly , you need some synchronization (would be a shame if a failed transaction made it into Taler as passed).
If I understand that correctly.
Gosh. It’s year 2025, I’ve achieved nothing. I was blabbering on these subjects in year 2011! I’ll be 29 in less than a month. But so cool that someone is making the humanity better.
Taler is cool, but it solves a completely different set of problems vs cryptocurrencies, and is ripe for being replaced with alternatives, undermining its primary purpose.
Here are a few of the problems being solved here:
Taker largely attacks the first two, and cryptocurrencies largely attack the second two, and I’m mostly interested in the middle two. However, since Taler doesn’t do either of the last two, it’s subject to either being ignored (i.e. if no banks are willing to support it) or directly competed against with something that sacrifices one of the first two, and customers won’t get the option of Taler.
I think Taler makes a ton of sense for something with its own currency, such as microtransactions or a browser extension for rewarding creators (say, in lieu of displaying ads). I don’t see benefits for banks who make a ton from credit cards. There are some cryptocurrencies that hit the last three (e.g. Monero), so that’s what I’m excited to see take off.
My portfolio disagrees.
Y’all should have bought BTC when the price was hovering around $19K about 3 years ago. I told you the price was going to go up, but no one listened. Now it’s at $105K, I’m $60k richer, and y’all are still whining and complaining that it’s a “scam”.
Hate to break it to you, but bitcoin isn’t to crash and burn anytime soon. It’s still early; buy in now or regret it for the rest of your life.
https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
It won’t crash indeed, cause it is too useful to scam people.
My Enron stock disagrees.
Your attack missed!
You can pull the Enron card when talking about investments in general; your comments do 0 damage.
The point did fly over your head, you’re right about that. Pointing at the current value of your scam investment as proof of it not being a scam does not make it legitimate.
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What argument? You pointed to the price of bitcoin going up and I pointed out that scams go up in value. Then you think it doesn’t apply to bitcoin because…? Oh, that’s right, you didn’t make any argument other than “number went up”.
No, it’s not. SOME cryptos are scams. Saying it all is a scam is ignorant.
deleted by creator
imagine not being able to read
they literally said some is a scam
therefore they don’t consider all of it to be good, and therefore they don’t ‘simp’ for it
deleted by creator
Even the “legit” parts are only used by people to try to get richt from it. It isn’t a currency and won’t ever be.
And as an investment it is bad. At least with real investments the company actually uses the money to improve. Crypto is nothing more than a sock under your bed.
You are wrong.
Monero is the only good crypto
No, but one of the good ones
Same way fiat is.
Édit: damn, and I thought bitcoiners were obnoxious You guys take the cake with so much copium.
Oh stop it
What’s the GDP of Bitcoinistan?
Can’t be any worse than the GDP of the 2025 fascist USA
I mean, it is worse
Probably the same as North Korea, with the amount of money laundering, ransomware, propaganda and scams they do 😄
They’re the same with AI. Had these people been interested years ago, they would be sitting pretty. But they kept telling everyone it’s garbage. Now it’s just sunk costs for them
I’m sure that if they found a set of keys for a Bitcoin wallet, they would just throw it away.
I certainly wouldn’t keep anything in cryptocurrency. I would transfer it to something stable.
I mean if I found a wallet with a million euros worth of bitcoin, I’d sell half and keep half. If it rises significantly, sell half of the remainder. And so on.
If I found a wallet with like 5k worth of BTC on it though? Just sell it all right away, it’ll do more for me now than say 10k in 5 years which is an insane long term return tbf.