It shouldn’t be forced on anyone, but if you appreciate a cryptographic way to own your money securely (USDC or otherwise), decentralized monetary networks give you ways to do that.
I work fulltime in the industry and the racket that is the traditional finance system is the one that resembles a ponzi/fraud/scam more than crypto in my mind.
Exactly. The core of the problem is the finance industry itself, they’d be scumbags regardless of the medium of exchange. Cryptocurrencies merely give you alternative method for transactions.
For every scam someone shows me about cryptocurrencies, I could probably show 10 with fiat currency.
The main “problem” with cryptocurrency is also its main selling point: crazy swings in value. That’s not great for regular savings, but it’s basically proof that there’s no central org messing with the currency and that value is determined purely based on supply and demand, just like gold and, to a lesser extent, stocks (stocks often pay dividends and provide voting privileges). And since it’s transparent, you can see any attempts to mess with valuations, which is less true for central banks.
There’s plenty of trustworthy stablecoins now. And lending platforms have far better yield than a tardfi savings account.
You don’t even need to speculate on some volatile token to move your savings onchain. Do it for the usd rate.
You’ve hit on another problem with the industry, and that is the fact that we are focused on the speculative network or project coins when retail would benefit so much from the network without changing their unit of value. They can just use USD.
We need to stop trying to sell Bitcoin as store of value or eth/sol as gas and start just onboarding usd.
My issue with stablecoins are that pretty much nobody actually accepts them for payment, whereas I can usually find someone to accept Bitcoin, ETH, or Monero, and of those, Monero is my favorite (less speculation, low transaction costs, privacy).
If stablecoins were commonly accepted, I’d probably use them for payment.
Payments is a beast of a final boss. I don’t use any of em for payments often at all. I just store value there. Like a brokerage account. And my business treasury.
If you’re into this space and not a Solana lover, you have to check it out. Huge ecosystem. All the large caps bridged as SPL tokens. Fast confirms. It makes defi fun and as responsive as a brokerage account or banking app
I don’t speculate on crypto because the expected return is negative (zero sum + exchange fees). So, transactions are the only reason I’d be interested, and that’s much easier to find for BTC, ETH, or XMR.
And I’m discounting the “store of value” here because the stablecoin I’d get would be tied to USD, so I might as well just hold USD and benefit from regulatory oversight and interest (I mostly buy US treasuries and treasury MMFs) and not open myself to the added risk and costs of holding crypto.
So until merchants accept stablecoins, I’ll stick with BTC, ETH, and XMR since they’re actually accepted by some merchants.
It’s freedom of money. That simple.
It shouldn’t be forced on anyone, but if you appreciate a cryptographic way to own your money securely (USDC or otherwise), decentralized monetary networks give you ways to do that.
I work fulltime in the industry and the racket that is the traditional finance system is the one that resembles a ponzi/fraud/scam more than crypto in my mind.
Exactly. The core of the problem is the finance industry itself, they’d be scumbags regardless of the medium of exchange. Cryptocurrencies merely give you alternative method for transactions.
For every scam someone shows me about cryptocurrencies, I could probably show 10 with fiat currency.
The main “problem” with cryptocurrency is also its main selling point: crazy swings in value. That’s not great for regular savings, but it’s basically proof that there’s no central org messing with the currency and that value is determined purely based on supply and demand, just like gold and, to a lesser extent, stocks (stocks often pay dividends and provide voting privileges). And since it’s transparent, you can see any attempts to mess with valuations, which is less true for central banks.
There’s plenty of trustworthy stablecoins now. And lending platforms have far better yield than a tardfi savings account.
You don’t even need to speculate on some volatile token to move your savings onchain. Do it for the usd rate.
You’ve hit on another problem with the industry, and that is the fact that we are focused on the speculative network or project coins when retail would benefit so much from the network without changing their unit of value. They can just use USD.
We need to stop trying to sell Bitcoin as store of value or eth/sol as gas and start just onboarding usd.
My issue with stablecoins are that pretty much nobody actually accepts them for payment, whereas I can usually find someone to accept Bitcoin, ETH, or Monero, and of those, Monero is my favorite (less speculation, low transaction costs, privacy).
If stablecoins were commonly accepted, I’d probably use them for payment.
Payments is a beast of a final boss. I don’t use any of em for payments often at all. I just store value there. Like a brokerage account. And my business treasury.
If you’re into this space and not a Solana lover, you have to check it out. Huge ecosystem. All the large caps bridged as SPL tokens. Fast confirms. It makes defi fun and as responsive as a brokerage account or banking app
I can see two use cases for stablecoins:
I don’t speculate on crypto because the expected return is negative (zero sum + exchange fees). So, transactions are the only reason I’d be interested, and that’s much easier to find for BTC, ETH, or XMR.
And I’m discounting the “store of value” here because the stablecoin I’d get would be tied to USD, so I might as well just hold USD and benefit from regulatory oversight and interest (I mostly buy US treasuries and treasury MMFs) and not open myself to the added risk and costs of holding crypto.
So until merchants accept stablecoins, I’ll stick with BTC, ETH, and XMR since they’re actually accepted by some merchants.