Ask HN: Is anyone using BTC or cryptocurrencies for transactions

1 points by nikajon_es 8 years ago | 6 comments

It seems that most of the focus on cryptocurrency now-a-days is for market speculation and investment purposes. I'm thinking of building a product that uses BTC as the main method of buying the product. Is anyone buying products with BTC?

ggm 8 years ago |

I tried to transact in BTC and BCH to donate to a s/w charity. The fees exceeded the value of the donation I had in mind. The protocol was not good, I sat behind a 15min time window which didn't complete in time. The representation (a URl like model) was not clear, i was scared the element behind the URL wasn't actually a BTC address, couldn't check quickly. Overall, I'd say transacting is hard.

Which is a shame, because if its not useful to transact small sums, its only really relevant to transact big sums. And that means its future really is IBM and FinTech, not mediating outcomes for small sum people like me. (I'm not interested in the speculative quality)

There are signals the charity sector is looking to use it to get rid of some graft in the emergency-intervention situation where a lot of freeloaders can pile in as middlemen in a transaction chain. That would be really good.

nikajon_es 8 years ago | |

I was thinking about the charity and donation sector as well for my use-case. So it's good to see that other people are working on it, are there any links that you can send about the use that you've seen?

ggm 8 years ago | | |

I went to the Sydney blockchain workshop in 2017, and the people who presented there were from "save the children" in the UK.

sternocleidom 8 years ago |

I don't, and I think part of why it's not used so much for transactions is privacy. Most cryptocurrencies provide a public log of all transactions.

Bitcoin Private https://btcprivate.org/whitepaper.pdf will add privacy, we'll see how it goes. Also LiteCoin is introducing LitePay in a few days, which might change things.

NewYorkCoin https://www.wsj.com/articles/newyorkcoin-gains-traction-in-c... is actually used as currency in NYC, and is fast enough and has no transaction fees.

So we're at the early stages of things, but between Bitcoin Private, Litecoin, and NYCoin, I expect lots more people will be buying with cryptocurrencies over the course of 2018

nikajon_es 8 years ago | |

Interesting... it seems that the smaller alt coins may be used for transactions, but theres a ton of them, and trying to support transactions in all of them may be difficult. Thanks for your thoughts.

randomerr 8 years ago |

No. It not economical to get the currency. It costs too much hardware and electricity to earn it. And the inflation from my nations's currency doesn't out weigh the advantages to just exchange it.

Plus there nothing physically backing up the cryptocurrency. Which means as soon as the public looses confidence it nothing more then. Also what happens if the internet goes down? There no way to access your wallet.