Cryptocurrency is a nice idea but there are and have always been too many gas fees for anyone to sensibly use it. I want to buy something not support everyone that get their hands in my transaction chain.

The US government can break up the duopoly and open up payments processing federally. That’s worth the investment than that pipe dream of a global, frictionless cryptocurrency.

▲

0x457 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

>Cryptocurrency is a nice idea but there are and have always been too many gas fees for anyone to sensibly use it. I want to buy something not support everyone that get their hands in my transaction chain.

But you're doing this with credit cards already? Different amounts, but still supporting everyone in a chain. If you want to "buy" something without supporting intermediates, then barter is the only way to go. Everything else requires common trust, and common trust comes with operating cost.

▲

bornfreddy 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Cryptocurrency is a nice idea but there are and have always been too many gas fees for anyone to sensibly use it.

That's not true, at least not in general. Polygon (and USDT/USDC on Polygon) fees are near zero, Ethereum is lately very cheap, and even Bitcoin fees are no longer outrageous. EDIT: ...and Bitcoin Lightning is cheap.

A lot of p0rn payment processing is done in crypto for exactly the censorship reasons. If you can't use the payment processor, who cares what their fees are? (not saying they are cheaper or more expensive than crypto - I don't know)

▲

xur17 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This has mostly been solved. Bitcoin's lightning network, ethereum layer 2 networks, etc all have sub-cent fees.

▲

lynndotpy 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not sure about Ethereum's equivalent, but 'Lightning' just reintroduces the problem of having one person act like a payment processor.

▲

xur17 7 days ago | parent [-]

Not sure I follow.

	▲	lynndotpy 5 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A node in the Lightning network (to simplify a lot) become the payment processor that would be targeted. (But it's kind of spurious- in practice, Coinbase, Block, etc. would be targeted far before someone running a Lightning node would be. The larger point is that very few people would interact with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies as a peer in the network.)
	▲	righthand 7 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		V or MC perhaps?

▲

righthand 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Even still I have put money into my bank then put it into cryptocurrency. My customers just want to use their bank, not a pseudocurrency. My customers aren’t trying to escape the payment processor. They can just pirate the game.

▲

TheCraiggers 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The US government can break up the duopoly and open up payments processing federally.

Between that and someone actually creating a viable Steam competitor, I will say the government breaking them up and rolling out their own solution would be even less likely. You'd have fights on both sides of the isle and from privacy groups. Not that we have much privacy now under the current scheme, but there's at least a tiny bit of separation between V/MC and the government.

What should happen instead is regulation. They should be held to the same standards as legal tender since they're used in place as such. They shouldn't get to decide how it's used, and that should be enforced.

▲

righthand 7 days ago | parent [-]

Isn’t regulation even less likely though than a split? You yourself acknowledge the times and the current admin is heavy anti-regulation.

	▲	TheCraiggers 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		Perhaps. You're right that it's currently unlikely, but I still argue that it would be easier to legislate than split up. It's not like the financial industry doesn't already have an insane amount of rules and regulations at both the state and federal level preventing them from being too nefarious. Having a rule that states "You're not allowed to cut off vendor foo just because they sell bar" doesn't seem that much of a stretch, especially if you look at credit as basically another form of legal tender.

▲

6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]