OK so its not trivial, but I really don't think it's a UX problem. Your grocer and your landlord don't accept crypto not because they can't figure it out, but because so far it hasn't shown itself to be an improvement.

It's got superior privacy properties, sure, but for most people that's not enough. Its gotta be better on other merits too. Until then it wont matter how easy it is to use because you'll still have to turn it back into fiat to use it and now you've just reinvented the problem you were trying to solve with crypto in the first place.

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wseqyrku 20 hours ago | parent [-]

> Your grocer and your landlord don't accept crypto

I don't mind using fiat for groceries. I'm talking only about digital currencies for digital services. That's it, at least for starters.

> Its gotta be better on other merits too.

There, a market niche deliberately being overlooked. You can totally reverse benchmark this whole thing if you can actually see its current flaws that prevents it to become mainstream.

> and now you've just reinvented the problem you were trying to solve

One intractable problem at a time my friend. I feel like those are the excuses we've been telling ourselves to not even try. The fact of the matter is that it's going to take time even after you have the infrastructure in place. You can read endless HN comments complaining about, let's call it the situation, on the side but I believe if anything at all it's going to be a grassroots movement and it has to start somewhere. It's actually pretty straightforward, take something that is hard, that you're an expert in, and make it stupidly easy. That's the formula I use anyways but crypto is not my strong suit.

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__MatrixMan__ 14 hours ago | parent [-]

I guess it comes down to how small of an economy is big enough. At my last job I ran across a situation where my company paid google for compute, and also they paid us for use of our product. So that's a 2-cycle, and if the amounts were the same we could in theory cut the payment gateways out of the loop and instead pay each other in crypto. But at that point, why pay each other at all?

And then there's the other extreme where everybody uses crypto instead of fiat. We have the status quo as evidence that that works to at least some degree. I don't know how many cycles you'll find in the fiat economy, bit its a large number.

For some middle ground situation to work, you don't need everybody to consume exactly as much digital services as they produce, but you need some kind of balance: something like for everyone who consumes twice as much as average somebody else consumes half as much as average. Then you could have this digital-services-only sub-economy.

The more asymmetry you have, the closer you are to having a single producer and millions of consumers, the more quickly you're going to need exchanges involved to restore balance. Else the tech workers run out of fiat to spent on groceries and the grocers run out of crypto to spend on their VPNs and... bored apes gifs?

We can get there by:

1. making the tech easy to use and hope it happens on its own.

2. create artificial demand for digital services via artificial scarcity schemes (this is why modern crypto looks like a casino: tokens as assets).

3. solve a larger share of real problems in ways that make sense to solve digitally (efforts like these are where you get utility tokens from).

More of 1 couldn't hurt. I think we've seen enough of the road that 2 is paving to not want anymore of it. But I think 3 is the bottleneck.

We're in agreement that things could be improved through grassroots change that involves using different payment protocols. But progress in that direction is stalled not because the payments system is hard to use, but because the products themselves aren't diverse enough to sustain their own sub-economy.

	▲	__MatrixMan__ 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		More fertile ground for kickstarting this kind of grassroots change would be somewhere with a lower barrier of entry. Imagine homebrewers buying and selling from each other without ever involving fiat. If you got better beer out of that arrangement than you can get at the liquor store... That would be and indicator that such dedicated sub-economies can work without an external hype cycle driving them. Then you could try something more ambitious like VPN service, that way your employees can at least buy beer with that portion of their paychecks (and the brewers can similarly buy VPN serice to avoid interference from the local government, which they might expect if they're "selling" alcohol).