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927 points smallerfish | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.27s | source
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epolanski ◴[] No.42925380[source]
Nobody wants to spend it anyway, just hoard or sell it to the next sucker willing to shell more $.

Among all the crypto shills I know I'm probably the only one who has used it for trade (0.25ish Bitcoins for a computer on caseking.de in late 2017 and few goodies on local bitcoin in the same year).

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dmix ◴[] No.42925427[source]
Mostly because transferring BTC is very expensive. Every time I’ve done it I’m shocked at the fees that sites like Bitbuy requires. So if you’re going to do it then it has to be for a good reason.
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xp84 ◴[] No.42925624[source]
This is fascinating to me because we were told 15 years ago (ish) that one of the main things that made crypto special (besides it being guaranteed finite unlike fiat) was that unlike say, Visa, it would be economic to use, even for small transactions, because The Big Banks wouldn't take their ~3% cut of every transaction. We all assumed that cut was determined by greed, but if Bitcoin is expensive to transact in now, it could be that in free market terms, that there is actually a certain value people place on the ability to move funds around, and if Bitcoin were much cheaper, that there is room for middlemen to take margin and push the effective cost of using crypto closer to the fees we hate being charged by banks to use the card networks.
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1. max51 ◴[] No.42935720[source]
a major difference you are not considering is that bitcoin fees are fixed and don't change based on the value of the transaction.

Right now they are at around 0.15$. That's too much IMO to go buy a 1$ coffee with bitcoin, but it would also be 0.15$ if you were buying a 2000$ macbook, a 60000$ car or a 2M$ house.