• Nix@merv.news
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    6 months ago

    They’re still pretty bad at being currency. Transaction fees are still too high and it’s still pretty slow and/or complicated

    • swearengen@sopuli.xyz
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      6 months ago

      Is it? The ATMs have been all over the place for half a decade at this point.

      As for fees it cost me 3 cents to send a $50 Litecoin transaction a few days ago. If I did that with Bitcoin it would have cost me $8 in transaction fees so you’re right there.

      Now days there’s a coin for every purpose.

      • Bitcoin = gold bars

      • Litecoin = mundane transactions

      • Monero = digital cash

      Crypto has been around for 15 years already. Time flys.

      • Kichae@lemmy.ca
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        6 months ago

        all over the place

        Speak for your own location.

        Also, “crypto works as a functional currency, which can be demonstrated by how you need to sell it for cash in order actually buy anything with it” isn’t the argument you think it is.

    • kate@lemmy.uhhoh.com
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      6 months ago

      Fees are high in Bitcoin but there are other options that are low fees/faster (still too complex for most people imo

      • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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        6 months ago

        I see cryptocurrency ATMs in various random places around town, they’re evidently not too complex for common usage. I think this is a bit of a chicken and egg thing, people would figure them out if sites like Gumroad actually used them. Porn is a powerful motivator for human ingenuity.

        And yeah, Bitcoin’s fees are silly and I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone wanting to use it as a currency. The Bitcoin community long ago decided they wanted to be “digital gold” and are firmly dedicated to making the token unusable for anything other than that. For general currency usage I’d recommend looking into stabletokens like USDC or DAI, they run on the Ethereum blockchain instead.

        • kate@lemmy.uhhoh.com
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          6 months ago

          I see the occasional Bitcoin ATM but they seem to be Bitcoin only, and they have their own high fees. I agree with the stablecoins point, though. Although ethereum has worse fees than Bitcoin these days there are ofc L2 options like those listed at https://l2beat.com