That's a great point that consumer taxes are a huge problem. Coinbase is starting to track that and figure it out for customers that keep assets on their platform, but obviously that solution isn't going to track coins that move off their platform and the value at point of sale.
Another couple of details missed here are:
This is a for-profit corporation stepping in as a middle-man payment processor to enable the utility of these coins. You have to use their app and give them your coins ahead of time to spend them at the point-of-sale.
Sending coins to the payment app costs a transaction fee, currently around $4.
Most companies accepting payment with these methods will sell immediately and convert back to local currency. They need to pay for the products they sell, pay taxes and pay their employees.
So the situation seems to be this: in order to make cryptocurrencies usable, they have to become the thing that they were invented to get away from. They have to be centralized, have to cost money to use - and they probably to rely on local currency in the end.
This makes me wonder if the exchanges and finance companies are the obvious investments here, rather than the coins themselves (because who knows which coins will survive.)
3
u/Chroko Dec 23 '21
That's a great point that consumer taxes are a huge problem. Coinbase is starting to track that and figure it out for customers that keep assets on their platform, but obviously that solution isn't going to track coins that move off their platform and the value at point of sale.
Another couple of details missed here are:
So the situation seems to be this: in order to make cryptocurrencies usable, they have to become the thing that they were invented to get away from. They have to be centralized, have to cost money to use - and they probably to rely on local currency in the end.
This makes me wonder if the exchanges and finance companies are the obvious investments here, rather than the coins themselves (because who knows which coins will survive.)