I can't find any concrete stats on how much cryptocurrency is being used for things other than investment (or speculation, to be more precise), particularly in the developed world where most of them are held. For example, what is the percentage of the outstanding cryptocurrency that's being used at stores (online or offline) on a monthly basis? Stores like McDonalds is accepting cryptos. Are they even being monitored and kept track of? All along, cryptos were supposed to do miracles for the world, leveling the playing field for the economically downtrodden, and yet I saw nothing of the sort. All I saw was greedy speculators driving up the price day after day, only to see it come crashing down. So just how much are we seeing cryptos actually being used in real-life scenario?
I don't go out much since covid first hit, but here in Ottawa there are a bunch of fast-food stores that will accept crypto payments. There are Bitcoin ATMs throughout the whole province, and they've been here for many years. I never bothered to use them once, as I prefer to use a regulated broker and get a return on my crypto when possible. But now you have me thinking, it may be a great adventure to buy equity into the those that make the Bitcoin ATMs and maintain them. I will try to do more digging around into this.
Probably only drugs, weapons, humans, all sorts of porn, stolen information, bribes and so on, are being traded with it.
The problem with your conditional "developed world" is that you're blinded by your privileged brat mentality The biggest usage for bitcoin and crypto assets are in the unbanked emerging markets, Africa, Brazil, Latin America, Asia, Turkey, Lebanon, Argntina, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and on and on and on
I merely said that because the vast reserve of crypto is currently held by those who live in the developed countries. But, sure, I agree it's used more in the developing countries (emerging markets). So the question is why Bitcoin and other cryptos are not being used for goods and services, as I think it was originally intended. And, moreover, why can I not find any info on this???
Well, we don't know who owns most of the bitcoins and cryptos. If I was an OG bitcoin whale, I'd have moved out of the US in the 2017 bull market, which many of them did Mircea Popescu died in Costa Rica but was originally from Europe. The guy who bought the 10,000 bitcoins for pizzas was also from Europe Binance dot com is the biggest exchange and does 10x more trading volume than Coinbase does not accept US or Canadian people Bitcoin settled $14 Trillion worth of value onchain last year more than Mastercard or PayPal, there's a metric out there if you google it, I believe biggest usage is in gift cards Was watching a youtube video on Bitrefill, paying mortgage and bills, but this is outside of US, too many restrictions in the US for crypto payment solutions KYC is #1, you can use cryptos in the US if you link it with PayPal or CC-linked Coinbase and stuff like that but then why bother and not just use Visa? Anyway, when CBDC comes to the US, many people will have to decide if they want to go crypto decentralized for payment rails to preserve privacy, the minute they try to buy too much beer or too much gas or put out a conservative-leaning tweet and they got blocked by ESG banking cartel like what happened with Kanye lost his JPM account, but Epsten never lost his JPM account, whateverz
Those are more like trading volume rather than purchase transactions. I think every country keeps a close tab on consumer spending. So it just behooves me that this isn't being done for the cryptos. For example, how much is invested, how much is spent on goods or services, etc, we don't know, do we??
It was implied that if the trading volume for cryptos is 10x bigger on binance dot com where no US or Canadians can trade, that suggests that there are some big crypto whales outside of the US and Canada Asian crypto traders are some of the biggest market-movers Anyway I'll repeat again, why use crypto for payments in the US where everyone has banks and credit cards? KYC everywhere in the US payment syste s, you'd use cryptos for pr0n subscription or some type of purchase you want anonymity EDIT I paid my tradingview account yearly subsctiion with btc, used a fake name, address in Korea (googled Hyatt address and modified it a little bit). See, privacy
The US is very backwards in crypto, but what do you expect from a backward nation that hasn't even updated to the metric system yet like the rest of the world? Part of the 3AC and other disasters lately is because no spot-ETFs are legal in the US. Yes, even after all this time they STILL have no spot-ETFs! This forced funds to do work-around trades using derivatives and riskier paths. And it ended epically because of this. This can not all just be blamed on SBF alone.