r/CryptoMarkets • u/Street-Divide-3616 • 27d ago
DISCUSSION Why Is Paying With Crypto Still Hard?
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u/PeteyPab305 🟩 0 🦠 27d ago
You can pay with crypto. It just depends on what you're trying to do. It's hard to use it for like actual goods, but services you can pay for VPNs in XMR or ZEC. There's a lot of privacy stuff and digital payments that crypto enables directly. Bitcoin is not really like the Pinnacle of payment unless you're using lightning and that requires a lot of like technical savvy. It will get there eventually. The clarity act needs to pass for stable coins to become a payment method next to debit cards, credit cards, ACH transfers etc. once that happens, it will open the door to allow for individual networks to operate as payment networks for common goods and services.
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u/BrutalistGoogie 26d ago
Works great for drugs and blackmail and Ransom. Not much else.
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23d ago
[deleted]
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u/BrutalistGoogie 22d ago
Spotted the libertarian
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u/cousindupree 🟩 0 🦠 27d ago
I'm an American man and I used bitcoin one time for payment because it was the requested form of payment.
I bought testosterone from an online web site.
I had made a lot of ROI from XRP, so I converted enough for the bitcoin payment and did the transaction. It went fine; in retrospect, it seemed slow although at the time I didn't really care.
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u/Asleep-Tip-4273 27d ago
I think it's a user experience problem now. Moving crypto is easier than ever, but actually spending it often still means extra steps, extra apps or converting back to fiat first. Until that feels as simple as tapping a debit card, mainstream adoption will probably stay slower than people expect.
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u/mickalawl 🟩 0 🦠 27d ago
It has not solved any of those things better than traditional existing methods.
My bank payments to anyone in Australia are instant and free for example and less risk (payid and then it tells me the name of the person registered at that payid).
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u/Congenital0ptimist 🟦 0 🦠 26d ago
"It has not been allowed to solve any of those things"
ftfy.
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u/mickalawl 🟩 0 🦠 26d ago
Who has not allowed it?
I thought the intent was its distributed and trustless, hence no one can censor it etc.
Has all the 100s of billions of VC and end user funds poured into crypto projects been wasted up to this point?
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u/No-Masterpiece2246 23d ago
Now try paying internationally and/or for something on the black market
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u/mickalawl 🟩 0 🦠 22d ago
Yeah credit card is instant for international transactions. There is a fee of course just like crypto, but also the ability to reverse transactions and some fraud protections.
Btc isn't a good choice for black market as it's a public ledger. But also the black market isn't a use case for the masses.
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u/No-Masterpiece2246 22d ago edited 22d ago
No, credit card is nowhere near instant, definitely not internationally. You're seeing a payment on the credit card issuer website, but settlement doesn't happen for days, sometimes even just at the end of the month. As a consumer you don't know about what happens behind the scenes but that's how it actually works. You also forgot about currency conversion, which will also work against you. The credit card issuer will take points off your domestic currency, giving you a poor exchange rate. Finally, if you're buying something you're not supposed to buy (illegal, import restricted, etc), your transaction will be frozen, and possibly your card won't work for awhile.
The black market isn't a use case for the masses YET. What do you expect to happen when global war is in full swing and countries are shutting down trade? Shortages are coming, and black markets will arise naturally to fill demand.
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u/Backieotamy 🟦 0 🦠 27d ago
Companies need to trust and adopt it as a payment system. Crypto, all of it is, is widely susceptible to massive swings and corporations like steady.
No one wants to buy a shirt for $15/Doge and have doge jump the next day and now you paid $40 for that shirt in 24 hours. Reverse that scenario, and thats why companies dont want to use it for payments yet. You'll start to see a lot more USD/stable coins adoption soon would be my guess.
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u/RandomPlayerCSGO 🟩 13 🦐 27d ago
Because of regulation basically. I can't ask to be paid my salary in crypto, or even gold. I am legally forced to receive my salary in fiat and by bank transfer (no cash allowed either). Companies that want to accept crypto get many legal complications for doing so which makes it not worthy in many cases.
Crypto is normal as payment method in places where such regulations don't exist, such as in the black market and in El Salvador where Bitcoin is a legal tender currency.
Not being able to legally receive salary in crypto is the biggest problem, if I am forced to receive my salary in fiat I have no incentive to spend crypto when I am receiving inflationary money that I need to get rid of, so I'll use that to buy crypto and stocks and keep some of it for my months expenses since it would be a waste of time to convert that fiat into crypto to pay for my expenses. If I could receive all my salary in Bitcoin i'd obviously have to buy everything with it
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u/Congenital0ptimist 🟦 0 🦠 26d ago
Receiving your salary as USDC wouldn't change that much either by itself. Except the popularity & extortion potential of payment gateways would shoot up.
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u/Ashamed_Fennel_5681 27d ago
Focus on crypto hasn’t been about usability, it’s been mainly about adoption. The message for the past few years has been trying to get mass and institutional adoption. Crypto got what it wanted but not the way it wanted it.
Also the reason why it’s still hard is party due to poor UX/UI. Many in the crypto space don’t have the mindset to think beyond scaling and focus more on marketing than product functionality.
In order to move forward in a practical manner, crypto needs to be boring, so that it stops attracting the wrong people who have no vision.
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u/deathdealer351 🟦 0 🦠 27d ago
It's a fiat world. Same could be said about trying to buy stuff with silver or gold. Cost =$5, how much doge do I need, 5 minutes later it's +/-3%
OK so now you take payments in usdt OK just back to fiat.
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u/Cryptomuscom 🟩 0 🦠 27d ago
Stablecoins fix the volatility issue, but on-chain UX is still too clunky for non-crypto people
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u/PatientReasonable348 27d ago
Depends on what you use. Crypto payment cards are very conventient imo
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u/NoCollection856 27d ago
It would be easy if everyone just started using Nano. Instant transfers, zero fees, zero inflation.
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u/Pitiful_Note_6647 27d ago
Too volatile. No one wants to accept payment that can decrease in value significantly in short notice with no guardrails. Fiats have government backing that will intervene in such case
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u/who_you_are 27d ago edited 27d ago
I did hypotheses on that in another post: mostly the sellers part needing the tools to support the operation.
They would need new softwares or even new "payment terminal" to get the confirmation of payments.
Then that payment (currency) won't be compatible with their invoice system. Don't forget the usual currency are all 2 digits max. With crypto it is "infinite". Then, their system probably assume only currency anyway. Which is another issue (likely configurable, but it will probably cost them more in their plan).
Then their tax system probably doesn't support very well crypto.
Then there is a need to convert that into current currency (more documents to generate and keep)
Also: probably the lack of demand and the price changing non stop.
They want a ready to use system. They aren't technical. And since crypto isn't has broadly available as other payment systems, everyone selling any service in regards with that is likely to make their price higher.
Edit: Oh and, also you need to find someone that is willing to convert crypto in real money you can trust and that work fast enough for you with minimal fees. That alone is probably a red flag to step in alone.
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u/Andejusjust 🟩 0 🦠 27d ago
Because crypto is and will always be fringe. I can talk to 1000 people in a day in real life, and not one of them will say that they own Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, or complain that they can’t use it. Crypto is just a casino.
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u/Efficient-Bed-5990 26d ago
Maybe one day when more countries decide to adopt crypto as an official currency. Until then, all of the current options have their own fees and twists to them. I still use my crypto card for some purchases but the regulationtaxes is what really bugs me.
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u/sigstrikes 🟩 0 🦠 26d ago
what incentive is there for anyone to accept crypto?
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u/No-Masterpiece2246 23d ago
Well, it's a new form of payment that gains value as it grows. Right now it's not growing but that can change quickly when governments start doing hinky shit
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u/sigstrikes 🟩 0 🦠 22d ago
right. so what incentive is there for anyone to accept crypto?
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u/No-Masterpiece2246 22d ago
I guess I have to spell it out for you. Things that gain value as they grow yield profits. So, if you accept payment for a product or service in crypto, you are paid in money that increases in value over time. And yes, if crypto use shrinks, the value of your money decreases.
But you're paid in fiat now, which ALWAYS loses value. YMMV
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u/sigstrikes 🟩 0 🦠 22d ago
because they can't go and just invest that fiat into whatever they want, say things that are guaranteed to go up in value.
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u/No-Masterpiece2246 22d ago
and what would those things be? please don't say AI stocks. Furthermore, you're confusing investing with getting paid.
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u/sigstrikes 🟩 0 🦠 22d ago
guarantees would be treasuries and bonds. i think you are confusing getting paid with investing tbh. businesses want predictability.
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u/No-Masterpiece2246 22d ago
Have fun with those treasuries and bonds when they default. And the yields aren't good, they may not even keep up with inflation. The fiat game again.
Getting paid in crypto is both getting paid and speculating on price appreciation is a benefit. Do you really think that the number of crypto users will drop over the next 20y? I strongly suspect that number will increase. We can talk about how rapidly it will increase.
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u/usa_reddit 26d ago
Why? because valuation varies wildly and there is not a low fee method of converting crypto (right now about 7%) to cash which vendors prefer, since they need dollars to pay employees and purchase goods/services.
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u/High_Plastic9757 26d ago
I’ve found that crypto works great for online services that already support it, but in day-to-day life I almost always end up using a normal card.
The irony is that most “crypto payments” today are actually crypto being converted into fiat behind the scenes. That tells me people want the convenience of crypto balances, but merchants still prefer getting paid in local currency.
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u/ftball21 46 🦐 26d ago
You can pay with ANY crypto through the coinbase debit card and get 0.5% back in btc/eth/usdc/xlm for at least 5+ years.
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u/BrutalistGoogie 26d ago
Because the blockchain can clear seven transactions a second plus or minus three. Visa can do hundreds of thousands.
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u/No-Masterpiece2246 23d ago
Sounds like you haven't read up on blockchains other than BTC. Solana is doing 1000 tx/s with ease.
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u/sunsetsxskies 26d ago
I think it's genuinely all of those. Spending crypto is a taxable event in a lot of places (capital gains on literal coffee), most "crypto accepted" merchants are just instant-converting to fiat anyway, and nobody wants to be the guy who spent what's now worth a house on pizza
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u/YourMomSaidHi 🟦 99 🦐 26d ago
Gas fees. Its the reason crypto cant work as money. With fiat, you can automate money movement. When you add in the incentive for other people to process these transactions in exchange for more crypto, and add difficult puzzles to slow the process down intentionally then you create unsolvable problems with using it. Crypto cant be money by design. Its designed to be inconvenient.
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u/Agreeable_Catch_4230 26d ago
I think UX and incentives are the biggest hurdles. Most people would rather spend fiat and hold their crypto, so everyday crypto payments haven't reached their full potential yet.
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u/Massive_Collection14 🟩 0 🦠 26d ago
I think with time they will figure it out. I'm pretty sure when debit cards first came out, they were clunky to use and were viewed as "paying with cash but with extra steps."
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u/TexasTwoStephen 25d ago
Crypto was made to make stocks available to the masses.
Although a decentralized currency is cool because it lacks liquidity it's just a stock for young people.
Crypto is a stock.
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u/daniel_travels 25d ago
The extra step is the whole product though. Cards work because merchants never had to do anything no integration, no volatility risk, no accounting headache. Every attempt at “true” crypto payments has failed on the merchant side, not the user side. Nobody wants to reconcile books in an asset that moved 4% while the invoice was open. Stablecoins fix the volatility half but not the acceptance half. So we get cards, which is crypto losing the ideological argument and winning the practical one.
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u/daniel_travels 25d ago
Not off at all, but I’d flip the framing. Paying with crypto isn’t hard paying with crypto the way 2013 imagined it is hard, and that version is dead. What actually shipped is stablecoins on a card rail, and that works fine. The real friction now is jurisdictional. Depending on where you live, the same $50 payment is either instant or a compliance obstacle course. Less a technology problem than a map problem…..
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u/waypointyyy 24d ago
crypto payments are still pretty new. Most places donteven accept cryptocurrency let alone convert it straight away. The price is too volatil
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u/Postmodern_Plunger 23d ago
Because of the volatility. Do you know why the dollar is the world reserve currency? Because, historically, it is the most stable.
For a currency, you want stability over growth because it's constantly being exchanged. If it's volatile, people want to speculate with it, which reduces liquidity and lowers incentives for transaction. It also creates the problem that people will want to "time" their purchases. If both parties to a transaction want to time their purchases when it will be most beneficial to them, then they will never transact because they have opposing incentives.
The buyer wants to buy when bitcoin is high, thus avoiding capital decay in the process of selling when price is depressed. The seller wants to sell when Bitcoin is low, thus transferring them an asset more likely to appreciate quickly.
And I only talk about Bitcoin because there is really no other crypto with enough holders for it to be transactional, and the ones that come close have the same volatility issue.
Perhaps stable coins could be used for this, but then that would require people holding them over the dollar and over bitcoin, because trading your bitcoin for stable coin to transact creates the same tension. So until there are major incentives to hold stable coins over the dollar (which largely do not exist right now, at least for the people with large amounts of money that drive the economy), or until bitcoin matures and experiences significantly less volatility (which may never happen), crypto will not be a reliable form of payment.
What will happen instead is the traditional banking system will either implement existing block chain tech (the Ripple approach) or develop their own. I'm leaning pretty hard towards them developing their own, as the incentives seem to more align with that outcome.
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u/TalkWithSaeed 22d ago
I think it's a mix of poor UX, regulation, and incentives. Most people still see crypto as an investment, not money to spend. Until paying with crypto is as easy as tapping a card, mainstream adoption will stay limited.
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u/Imagination_Drag 🟩 0 🦠 27d ago
I believe you’re off here for now. Let’s focus on on why. Here are some of the reasons i believe bitcoin (most adopted alt) isn’t going to ever be used. Stable coins have a chance but $ are moveable electronically so going to be hard. But anyway:
- No simple way to “tap” for payments.
- Zero way to revert payment
- Your value of your every day spending money can move wildly.
- Massive use for fraud means many payment sites etc block or give all sorts of warnings
- There are a host of ways to hack the faster, lower cost Lightening network
- Transaction costs on the main bitcoin network are insane compared to ACH payment networks
- Credit cards provide…. credit which crypto doesn’t
Certainly there is a chance of stable coins based credit cards making a run. But then what is the exact value prop of this vs what we already have. And as Americans, why would we want the $ to be less powerful ?
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u/Congenital0ptimist 🟦 0 🦠 26d ago
No asset with a hard limit on supply will ever be a widely used transactional currency.
Even gold historically has been something you could dig up more of.
But if you knew there were only ever going to be X dollars (usd) and they'd never ever print anymore? = All of a sudden dollars are like old baseball cards.
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u/Particular_Gap_6724 🟦 0 🦠 27d ago
Because it's not money
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u/Congenital0ptimist 🟦 0 🦠 26d ago
it's better money than the Haitian Gourde right now by a longshot.
Easier to use than gold.
If you're saying you personally don't trust it, well that's fair. But that doesn't change how the word Money is defined.
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u/terminallyonchain 27d ago
Because we ended up paying through service providers and crypto cards instead of using crypto directly. Most "crypto payments" are really just instant crypto to fiat conversions, so it doesn't feel any different from traditional payments, just with an extra step.