It's still really hard to use bitcoin as a regular currency

[cafucafucafu]

The days of doing small purchases with bitcoin are over now. The fees have risen too much to make this feasible.

Bitcoin is changing more to a store of value in its current shape than a currency.

The problem is, there was so much hype a few years ago about bitcoin being a currency, that journalists now think it's a bit of a failure if you can't spend it on regular things.

Bitcoin is cucrrently definitely more of an asset and probably won't change in the near future tbh.

Bitcoin has the ability to change the world and its whole economic structure even though it's not considered to be a currency. It's still a great store of value for your wealth, much like gold. Some people hate it when others call bitcoin "digital gold" but i really don't see the problem of calling it that. As much as transaction fees are skyrocketing it is still relatively cheaper for people to send bitcoin even locally, than to arrange a gold pickup/delivery.

Problem is apparently all media cares about is whether bitcoin can be used in stores or not irl, which isn't really a good measurement of how successful bitcoin is at all.

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[Red-Apple]

very interesting and also a little bit sad article to read about bitcoin real usages in real world, which is we are aiming for!

maybe it is just me but it raises the question of "why now" in my head...
bitcoin has been around for 8 years, it has been used for nearly as much too. Gyft has been around for a couple of years now and Uber gift cards were listed there for a while and a lot more.... so why now that we are at the peak of fees they decided to put bitcoin to the test!

i mean this article could have been very different 6 months ago and remember that in the past 6 months the mass adoption was in Japan, things in US didn't change much.

[LTU_btc]

In my opinion, only solution to use bitcoin as a regular currency is a bitcoin debit cards. You can pay with bitcoins wherever cards is accepted. High fees and slow transactions is what makes complicated to use bitcoin directly as a regular currency. It's also one of the reasons why business don't want to accept bitcoins.

[SimmonenY]

Maybe if the price was more stable with lower fees because today you buy a cup of coffee for 5$ and tomorrow it is 2$ and it turns out that you overpaid.

[alyssa85]

very interesting and also a little bit sad article to read about bitcoin real usages in real world, which is we are aiming for!

maybe it is just me but it raises the question of "why now" in my head...
bitcoin has been around for 8 years, it has been used for nearly as much too. Gyft has been around for a couple of years now and Uber gift cards were listed there for a while and a lot more.... so why now that we are at the peak of fees they decided to put bitcoin to the test!

i mean this article could have been very different 6 months ago and remember that in the past 6 months the mass adoption was in Japan, things in US didn't change much.

Ever since bitcoin went mainstream in 2013, the press has been doing these types of stories, at least one a year.

The first one was done by Kashmire Hill, see

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/05/01/living-on-bitcoin-for-a-week-the-journey-begins/

She actually did a diary publishing every day for a week about her experiences. I remember how excited people were at the time - a whole bunch of redditors donated bitcoin to her (I think bitcoin was about $125 at the time).

The press keep going back to these types of experiments to see what has changed, progressed since the original.

The sad thing reading that original 2013 article, and then then comparing it to the 2017 one, is that we appear to have gone backwards. I think lots of vendors that enabled bitcoin in 2013, disabled it in the crash of 2014. Meanwhile the fees have shot up. It's not good.

[Qrivium]

BTC or crptos in general are not a stable store of value.   IF Bob does work for Alice and it costs 10k would he accept BTC as payment?

Forgetting about all the other issues that might prevent Bob accepting BTC, the price fluctuation alone will cause pause.  Alice could send X BTC = $10k, but by the time Bob gets them it could now be worth  less than 10k or more.  Given that I think Bob will not opt for payment in BTC. 

[BitcoinPC]

The biggest hurdle is the ever changing price/value. Consider that full use of a currency would mean direct deposit of your paycheck and using those funds after that.  Take this week as an example, if you make $3000 per week, great pay by the way, and got paid on Monday, you got paid 1 BTC.  I may have that $3000 price at the wrong time in the week, but you get the idea.  If you have not touched your paycheck and go to spend it today for whatever, your $3000 paycheck is now $2200. 

[Yakamoto]

Bitcoin fees have become too big now for day to day smaller transactions. I paid over ten dollars for a five hundred dollar value transaction and it took also twnety four hours plus to get through to the other side. So Bitcoin is only best used for bigger transactions in my view that is.

That's something I have been noticing, however I haven't been paying a ton more than I usually do, maybe somewhere in the ballpark of $1 or whatever, however I pay cheaper (I believe) because typically my transactions are lumped with others and it makes the fee for the individual go down while the fee overall remains unchanged. Not the best situation but it's working right now. If we could get fees down completely, then I would be happy. But that comes with a change to the blocksize, probably.

[Xester]

For now it is hard to use bitcoin as regular currency and we all know that.  Bitcoin is not yet accepted worldwide and little establishments knows it.  But does that not mean it will be like that forever.  Little by little and as time passes by, many people will know bitcoin and will be acknowledge as one of the currency.

[Wind_FURY]

Does Bitcoin really needed to become a regular currency though? Why use it instead of other easier options like cash and credit cards. I honestly would only use Bitcoin if I had no other choice.

[cpfreeplz]

Now this idiot reporter thinks that these fees are normal and is telling people not to use it basically because her ice cream sandwich cost 2x more than it would have normally. Great. Why can't the mainstream media just keep their nose out of our business lol?! They obviously love it so much so stop trying to shit on bitcoins. People will just laugh in the future reading these articles online.

[thisappointed]

It depends on the person I think or in the place where you are living, because if the place where you are is accepting bitcoin, I mean where bitcoin is their currency then spending it is not that hard, but if it is not, then I could say that you are going to have a hard time on spending it, though it is not really a must to spend it on the first place as long as you could use fiat on to something that you want to buy.

Spending bitcoin on everything that we do need in our everyday live is not really worth it, because we could make profits out of it if we are going to hold it and wait for the right time to convert some to have profits in the long run.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

"Leveraged bitcoin maps"?  What kind of funky financial writing is going on there?

Bitcoin sucks as a currency,  perhaps cnbc was trying to illustrate that.  I've known that for quite some time and it has little to do with not being able to find restaurants in NYC that take it.  That's a small thing.  Anyway, bad press is always good for bitcoin. 

[BrewMaster]

Bitcoin sucks as a currency,    I've known that for quite some time

that is just your opinion!
i have been using bitcoin as a currency (in addition to investment) for some time now and i have never experienced any "sucking" in it as a currency. the network is the strongest in security and code. and i am keeping a very good level of privacy when i am using bitcoin.
also i have saved up on a lot of money using discounts whenever i find them.

[foxbat]

Bitcoin fees have become too big now for day to day smaller transactions. I paid over ten dollars for a five hundred dollar value transaction and it took also twnety four hours plus to get through to the other side. So Bitcoin is only best used for bigger transactions in my view that is.

Your point is very true, no one actually uses bitcoin. to replace the usual money. Bitcoin has many advantages for investors but there are also disadvantages.You will benefit when using bitcoin on large transactions. But when you make small transactions the bitcoin fee is higher, so it is very disadvantageous.
There are many difficulties for bitcoin to be considered as conventional money

[AicecreaME]

I don't think that bitcoin is hard to use as a regular currency because it is not that hard to carry because you only need internet and also a device to carry bitcoin wallet and after that then you are already set and all you need to do is to buy the things that you want and pay it by bitcoin which is very easy to do by just getting the payment address and sending the exact amount of money then you are good to go.

[Pettuh4]

I don't think that bitcoin is hard to use as a regular currency because it is not that hard to carry because you only need internet and also a device to carry bitcoin wallet and after that then you are already set and all you need to do is to buy the things that you want and pay it by bitcoin which is very easy to do by just getting the payment address and sending the exact amount of money then you are good to go.

I agree in part with you but the OP has a point too because if it has these challenges of delayed confirmations and high fees per transactions (i.e. $8 on some web wallets) then it's going to be definitely difficult to sell de as a regular currency because you can't be waiting for long confirmations plus you can't afford to be loosing out 8$ on say every 70$ transaction. This is where the problem lies.

[South Park]

This is correct, bitcoin is still too difficult, and that is without taking in to account the market that we want for bitcoin to have, which is the average person, for many of them, the terminology used in bitcoin is not going to make much sense, can you imagine the amount of coins that are going to be lost due to the ignorance of how things work in bitcoin, I have seen people forgetting the passwords of their mobile phones and facebook accounts.

[justspare]

Bitcoin fees have become too big now for day to day smaller transactions. I paid over ten dollars for a five hundred dollar value transaction and it took also twnety four hours plus to get through to the other side. So Bitcoin is only best used for bigger transactions in my view that is.

bitcoin is a high level currency and its transaction fees is accordingly if a person is having large amount of bitcoin  he will definitely get his/her large amount of profit using bitcoin on daily base is not so much hard if there is a little side affect there is benefits as well so we can use it on daily base without any problem. 

[JimmieA]

Yes, it is really hard when btc is just a virtual currency so when dealing with internet access it is really difficult to use btc for everyday services such as: Eating, traveling ... and when doing btc transactions regularly , the fee is not small.