I meant to say "amusing," not "I'm using." Like so:
I find the fact that you wrote both of these in the same post amusing.
What does this mean? Are you saying crypto currency will become the defacto currency in the future?
Most people still haven't figured out what the deal is with cryptocurrencies. Deciding what you think of any crypto, much less Bitcoin, based on the current value or price volatility is COMPLETELY missing the boat.
We used to use paper money. When you had paper money, you at least had it.
Society is nearly finished replacing paper money with things like PayPal, Venmo, bank-to-bank... But have lost sight of the fact that in those systems,
you don't have any money.
They have money, and you have their promise to give it back or use it as you direct. They can still lose it or go bust. If your money is in a bank, then depending on the investment, you may qualify for FDIC insurance if the bank goes bust... To be made whole months after the bank collapses.
If you think you control your PayPal funds, try sending something to a chipper with the note, "this is for that thing on PCF."
Cryptos are the first electronic currency systems where you can actually control your funds. It's actually like holding paper money without the paper - you actual have the ability to keep or spend the crypto. This is the first fundamental advance in the nature of money in a very, very long time. (PayPal and Venmo are just fancy ways for someone else to hold your money.)
Without having its value monitored or pegged it’s never going to replace existing currency.
There are several cryptos which are pegged to Fiat currencies like the US Dollar. All the major cryptos have prices monitored across multiple liquid exchanges. Things like Bitcoin now have multiple price indexes tracked by reputable financial firms.
With greater adoption, investment, and liquidity in the future, the volatility will go down. Notable: there are many Fiat currencies in the world with greater volatility than Bitcoin. Here in the US, it's easy to forget about all the other currencies in the world, because we've had several stable decades. But there are lots of places where people prefer to save something other than their own currency. And I'm not even talking about places with outright crashes, like Zimbabwe and Venezuela.
Without having its value monitored or pegged it’s never going to replace existing currency. Maybe for short term / small transactions but for savings or mid-large transactions it’d make a poor substitute.
Cryptocurrencies are an excellent substitute for Mid or large transactions. Several cryptocurrencies provide for irreversible payments with certainty regardless of the amount, and do so at a tiny cost to the sender and receiver. (Tiny compared to bank-based costs.)
I know this isn't widely understood yet, and there's a lot of disinformation and outright fraud in the growing cryptocurrency sector, but not too many years from now, people will look back on this. And laugh.
Just like back in the 90s, when people said that online commerce can't possibly take off because nobody would ever trust their credit card numbers online.
And back in the 70s, a lot of people thought credit cards would never take off, because most of us would never trust using plastic, and no Merchants would trust accepting plastic.
In a few years, using cryptocurrency will be commonplace and nobody will understand why there was such a fuss about it before. I won't predict which cryptos will be in use and which ones will fail, but the idea of writing off cryptocurrencies as a sector will look ridiculous in retrospect.
