Nobody is saying there's no use case for cryptocurrencies. However they absolutely suck in the main use case - payments. There are no chargebacks/protections against scams, the UX is atrocious or relies on an unregulated and unprotected third party. It's slow, it costs money to spend money. And it's also destroying the planet with useless electricity consumption when there's an energy crisis and climate change with resulting need for transition going on.
All the rest hippie anarchist bullshit "take control", "inflation", "fiat" etc. is just bullshit that's either idealistic to the point of stupid or just stupid.
Hmm, seems like this guy wouldn't get his $3,000 stolen if he got paid SPL USDC. The transaction would also cost less energy than it did through Stripe.
Funny because you sound like a guy that could claim crypto is an unregulated far west full or scammers, while trying to prove that seizing 100K at law enforcement request is the same as randomly keeping 3K of your customers funds.
> If Circle suspects or determines that you or any of your authorized users or customers, as applicable, have violated this these Terms, including, but not limited to, attempting to transact or transacting with Blocked Addresses (as defined in Section 13) or attempting to engage or engaging in Restricted Activities or Prohibited Transactions, and you have a Circle Account, then Circle may be forced to terminate your Circle Account and you may forfeit any USD funds otherwise eligible for redemption.
The list of "Restricted Activities" this applies to is quite broad, including "provide false, inaccurate, or misleading information". The parent poster's claim this couldn't happen with USDC is readily proven false.
So how can you possibly say "The transaction would also cost less energy than it did through Stripe" if you have no idea how much energy a traditional transaction takes?
The linked page includes the energy cost of a Google search. I made an informed guess that operations done infrequently and deliberately written in extremely power-inefficient ways cost at least that much.
And what did you base that off of? Do you know the efficiency of a Stripe transaction, compared to a Google search? And what does "a Google search" even entail? How far down does it go? Where did that number come from?
How could you possibly compare the two?
At best, you're making a guess (I wouldn't exactly call it "informed") based on some randomly sourced data on a blog, which uses another blog for its source, which uses a third blog.
Because not only they are not a solution to payments in general, not only their deflative nature will never make them good at being "money", but they are not even the solution to this very specific problem as well.
Because the solution to this problem is providing a better customer care or face losing business and legal action.
It would end up exactly the same way. Just as no serious merchant simply puts up their IBAN and says "wire me the money", no serious merchant will put up their crypto wallet address saying "wire me the cryptos". They would use some kind of crypto wallet payment provider/aggregator putting them at the exact same spot they were at before.
Sending money to an arbitrary IBAN is much more difficult than sending money to an arbitrary crypto wallet address. There is far less friction, to the extent that it's closer to the difficulty of clicking a link on the Internet (not difficult at all, in other words).
