President-elect Donald Trump has now found yet another way to convince his followers to throw their money his way — this time with a questionable cryptocurrency venture.Axios is reporting that the soon-to-be 47th president of the United States has rolled out a "meme coin" dubbed $TRUMP, which is bei...
With one notable exception…when it is actually used as a medium of exchange, to buy drugs on the internet. (Which the vast majority of crypto is not used for, especially shitcoins like Trump’s scam.)
Drugs and money laundering, and I am very sure the latter is going on with this, by design.
I don’t know if this one is more money laundering or bribery or both, but it’s clearly something in that ballpark, yeah.
Yeah and you’re a fool if you use Bitcoin for that purpose
That would be what XMR is for
Crypto can be used at regular merchants as well. It’s very handy for avoiding interchange fees, and annoying bank rules. For instance, my own bank will not allow me to make any purchases with a vendor outside of the US, even if I call them and try to pre-authorize it; their excuse is that there’s too much fraud. That means that if i want to buy, for instance, military surplus apparel and equipment from Czechia that I have to find a company that uses a US payment processor, or find someone that’s importing the surplus that I want, rather than going directly to the source. If I want a surplus Czech OM-90 gas mask, it’s about $400 new through a US distributor, and about $50 or less (…plus shipping) if I buy one directly from Czechia. Even allowing for the relatively small mining fees with crypto, and the costs of shipping, buying direct with crypto ends up being much cheaper than using a US distributor, or trying to find a bank that doesn’t either prevent foreign transactions or charge usurious fees for them.
assuming you can find a merchant that takes it.
True enough.
It can be, but it’s not typical. I’ve actually used the barter system more often than I’ve even heard of people actually using crypto for routine business transactions. And I live in an area where barter is not a standard arrangement.
It’s not just the cost of the transaction, which can vary depending on demand (lack of predicability is another issue), it’s also how long the transactions can take. For any retail establishment, taking an hour to process a transaction is entirely unfit for purpose. A minute is too long.
In your use case, you’re using Bitcoin more like a payment processor than as a currency. Something like PayPal would work just as well if your bank played ball, and would work faster and have more predictable costs.