For me the whole crypto is just speculation at the moment. You can’t pay with crypto anywhere, and the only reason people buy it is to sell it to other people afterwards.
Therefore, the only thing that matters in the moment is the price. Maybe if Safe manages to put a crypto wallet in everyone’s phone we will see the use of crypto for money, but until then it is only a speculative tool.
Not strictly true.
Beer can be bought in Scotland with crypto - if the barstaff who know how to do it are on duty and the pub is not locked down… 
A house was sold for crypto in Glasgow 2 yrs ago, I believe similar has happened in LA and hopefully Im about to place an order for a fur hat to be paid in MAID
It makes a big difference to me if the coin is getting traded around vs a few large bags being an axe hanging over the market. If its flowing it’s constantly confirming value. If a DeFi coin is soaring but the devs still have like 50% of the coins that’s dangerous. You can’t trust current price to reflect actual value as much.
There are a number of sites that use one or another crypto coin payment gateways.
And now Paypal has crypto as a payment method.
There is a Aussie company building a point of sale system for (brick&mortar) businesses to accept crypto as well as other payment methods. And they have a government grant to help them do it.
These do not accept bitcoin directly, they use intermediaries. You pay with bitcoin, they get fiat. Bitcoin was created to remove intermediaries, not add new ones…
For tax purposes a fiat value has to be determined.
All payment gateways do exchange between the payment currency and the currency used by the business. There is no difference for crypto to business currency.
Payment gateways do forex exchanges automatically now and also some are doing crypto exchanges. Its all the same thing, just not fiat.
This is your interpretation. My interpretation is that business does not want bitcoin and does not care about bitcoin and 99% of humanity does not care.
The whole crypto is widely used for speculation and speculation only. People keep it to sell it at a higher price, they don’t buy it to use it.
Well the Aussie point of sale machines are being installed in the international (or is it domestic) airport terminals. This will allow customers to pay in foreign currency or crypto. The business will receive local currency like other payment gateways already do.
Its not an interpretation but what is being done.
And the online sites are similar, the customer pays in their local currency and the business receives payment in their local currency. EG customer in Australia pays in AUD and the business in the USA receives USD. Similarly customer pays in BTC and the business in say Australia receives AUD. This is what payment gateways supplied by banks, paypal, zelle, 3rd parties do for a business - exchange from one payment currency to another currency for the business.
(Yea I know many international businesses only receive USD)
I’m not in the crypto for that and I’ll never say it’s a good thing. I’m in the crypto to see decentralization.
I want people to be able to exchange value directly with each other without an intermediary.
For me, new intermediaries are a bad thing, but probably a necessary step without which we will not be able to put a crypto wallet in every phone. Until that happens, people will continue to use the crypto only for speculation.
Most stores use a payment gateway, very few do their own payment gateway. Its the norm.
Online sites have a payment gateway module as part of their POS package they install. All credit card payments (apart from manual) go though a payment gateway. So currently intermediary is the way things are done.
I agree that direct exchanges is a good thing and we may see a large increase with coins/tokens like safetokens. But I’d say that most business will just have their payment module in their sales software use a gateway that can accept crypto or safetokens. Maybe someone will make a safetoken gateway for Safe network APPs to allow business to receive fiat immediately.
I paid my airplane tickets with crypto (cheapair, destinia, expedia), I used to pay in crypto to buy food and get it delivered (in foodler, before it got acquired by grubhub), domain names and VPNs with crypto.
In fact in a trip to Chile I was almost stranded because my debit card wasn’t accepted anywhere and I didn’t bring any cash. Cryptocurrencies saved me from being a homeless as I was able to reserve a hotel room paying straight with bitcoins on Destinia.
Btw, this year my health insurance seems to be planning to accept bitcoins, or at least it is in the middle of integrating because now there are three options to cancel debt: credit card, debit card and bitcoins.
Of course, I also tested here and there to pay with crypto. That is not the question. The point is that in most places you lose percentages from intermediaries and you lose if you buy back (paying for vacations is interesting because there intermediaries in everyday life have such brutal mark-ups that really crypto products undercut their prices, for example you can see Locktrip - they have almost 0% markup).
Although I’ve tried to pay with crypto, it’s crazy because it’s like trading - you don’t know if you won’t be at a loss when you buy back, the price of crypto is moving too far, so on a large scale 99% of people just keep it for speculation.
Of course, if you have been in the crypto for a long time, you may want to pay for your vacation or VPN with it simply because it has risen by 26300% (hex) since 1 year ago.
I can feel ETH 1k+ in the next 5-6 months. Few pumps and few dumps in-between there but the crypto charts are looking strong these days between last bull market to now.
The money that you have is your money really when you spend it. While waiting for capital appreciation sometimes we need to live abit. I plan to spend some of my cryto gain on toys I’ve been longing for now. I’ve been hoping that my PS5 value in crypto would become a Porche. But let’s not forget today too.
I understand this perfectly and I don’t think it’s a bad thing. To get rid of the fiat system, there must be people who take the speculative risk so that the crypto can grow and attract the other 99.99% of humanity.
What I don’t understand is why do you have to close your eyes to reality? Apparently the masses of people currently use the crypto only for speculation. For the people in the white countries no one is trying to censor transactions of money and they don’t need to pay in crypto.
Things need to be said in straight way so that we can have a discussion about how to improve our world…
From my conversion with friends,
). People are generally trusting banks and government on keeping value secured. Ask anyone one the street about their opinion on central banks printing fiat and what happen to the country in the long run. They’ll say it’s good.All these things you say are true. That is why I popularize the idea that the same will apply to the Safe network in the first stage of development.
People will be more willing to keep the Safe Tokens than to spend them and use them.
This will open us up to economic attacks from other Safe Networks that will try to steal our farmers by offering them more money. It is very important to discuss how we can oppose this.
I don’t understand the above.
What are “white countries”? Nobody has ever tried to “censor” my transactions. (Not that I really understand what “censoring” in this context means.) Quite the contrary. Every transaction I make in euros is tracked, unless I use cash, which is becoming more and more difficult. I can’t go to the bank and withdraw a few thousand euros without giving the clerk a reason for my withdrawal. If i refuse, he won’t give me my money. The same goes for deposits. I can’t deposit a few thousand without telling the clerk where I got the money.
So, in practice, I mostly have to use debit or credit cards for money transfers, i.e. buying stuff. These transfers are not “censored” but tracked, and most probably sold to companies who are interested in what I spend money on.
As a sidenote, the Finnish government’s authority on “population information” by default sells our contact information to e.g. direct marketing companies. It is possible to opt out, but I don’t think many people know about it. It’s not really advertised…
First we need to have a SafeNetwork. I hope it’s happening soon.
Hmm… so let’s get rich quick on this Safenet thing and burn some money by making an advertisement campaign about that possibility. Would be so much fun! I’m thinking about TV spots mostly, but maybe some direct marketing would be the best way to reach the right (non)consumer segment. 