Why I think crypto currencies (including BCH) will fail

[Damian Banks]

In 2017 I learned about bitcoin. From my experience, it was mainly used by gamers and black markets. I'm a gamer but at first I didn't really want to use it because it seemed pretty complicated and extremely volatile. However, some people only accepted bitcoin because it's impossible to refund and paypal refunds are a HUGE issue. The majority of web shops already require id verification if you want to pay with paypal or credit cards, so bitcoin was a viable solution to a massive problem of people (semi) professionally scamming shops. You probably know the many forums where people talk about how to refund for a living.

I was overwhelmed by the demand for bitcoin recently and started to think probably we are all going to pay only in bitcoin soon. However, it turned out that using bitcoin was made almost impossible and even Steam discontinued bitcoin. It was discouraging to see people just speculating and trading and not using it. I switched mainly to ETH, BCH and XMR but I feel these currencies are barely accepted anywhere.

I know that BCH is aiming to improve merchant adoption. However, from my experience the gaming scene has completely switched back to paypal. I’ve never found people selling or buying things for BCH/ETH/XMR. It just doesn’t have any adoption, so “hodling” these coins is extremely speculative at the moment, as we cannot know which one will get adoption. At the same time, people treat every so called “shitcoin” like it could evolve to the next bitcoin very soon, causing a massive speculative bubble. It didn't pop yet, not even close, cryptos are still massively overvalued. The adoption and usage driven value of bitcoin might be at 1$ per BTC or 10$ per BTC or optimistically maybe at even at 100$ per BTC bot for sure not at 10k$. That's 99% driven by people thinking they could become millionaires by speculating.

I can’t imagine a system that contains houndreds of different crypto currencies which are used and adopted. Some people claim, it will be possible for all to survive as merchants could just adopt all of them and instantly exchange them, especially with systems that link different blockchains, make atomic swaps possible as well as upcoming decentralized exchanges. It still doesn’t make any sense for me. If you could just use every “shitcoin” because it can be exchanged to another coin or fiat, the amount of currencies would grow exponentially, causing more inflation than printing fiat money. While you already had a risk holding bitcoin, you now have to hold so many different coins that the risk to reward ratio gets very disadvantageous even for speculators.

How many people do you think are actually interested in using crypto currencies? I think average customers have no advantage in using them as they have much better buyer protection with paypal and also zero volatility (in fact not zero and dollar or euro could also crash but that’s unlikely right now and if you believed it long term you’d just hodl real gold and silver and not digital gold and silver which can be created by everyone by copying the source code). Only merchants could have a serious advantage by accepting crypto currencies as they are non-refundable but if there is zero customer demand it doesn’t make sense for them.

 Adoption is dying out and loads of shitcoins are causing more inflation than central bankers could even imagine. Customers don’t have an advantage by using crypto, merchants have but won’t use it if there’s no customer demand. Unlike gold/silver it's also not a viable hedge against fiat currencies.

[Isaak Brenner]

Blockstream has set crypto adoption back by about 4 years. It's a huge, huge setback, no doubt about it. But the mistakes that allowed Blockstream to gain control of Bitcoin will not be repeated. We will get back the adoption. It's going to take time, but it will happen. We did it before, and we can do it again.

[Ethan Becker]

Its a bootstrap process, but now that we have a working currency again - BCH - we can build out the other parts of the ecosystem : debit cards, mobile apps, point of sale on your phone, bch atms, website payment ssystem integration, social media tipping .. the whole shebang.

Its actually happening pretty fast now ... new stuff everyday.

I just put up moosh.io and there are a few other competitors making apps for retail too.

Just yesterday I found out about a Crypto Cafe in Dublin.. a place to buy a coffee and cake with crypto and chat about the topic. [ they don't take BCH yet, mainly LTC and ETH from what I heard ] .. this is a beginning.

We need a cafe like this in every big city, so people can go and see how it works. If people see it working in retail, they can adopt. First the business gets only a few crazy fanatics coming in .. but then it gets wider and more mainstream.

[Red-Apple]

In 2017 I learned about bitcoin. From my experience, it was mainly used by gamers and black markets.

well people only see things from where they hang out at.
if you leave the black markets and get out of the games you can see that bitcoin is used in a lot of places. and the fact is the usage of not-anonymous bitcoin in places such as black markets is too small compared to the whole use cases.

[MadAndHoldersPattern]

Yeah, it's a bit ironic that people buy cryptos to "hodl" them instead of using them. Their main use as of now is speculation. They're a financial asset class, no longer a technology. Bitcoin has turned into a "store of value", perpection has changed and it's no longer used for what was intended to be used.
Very interesting times for sure. There will surely be some winners among alt coins who will find real word use case, and become adopted, as of now they're just a speculation vehicles with nothing else to offer except day trading exchange pairs.

[Samarkand]

...

 Adoption is dying out ...

How did you arrive at this conclusion? The exchanges, which people use to exchange fiat to Bitcoin
are drowning in support requests and user registrations. Some exchanges had 100k unique customers
signing up for an account in a single 24hr period. Bitcoin is all over the mainstream media and
much more known that it was a few years ago.

Merchant adoption may be a bad metric to measure the success of Bitcoin.
You are looking from a wrong angle if you reduce Bitcoin to its value as a payment
system like Paypal. How about the other features like an immutable ledger, a censorship-resistant
store of value...?

[brickafterbrickwalldpt]

I have never seen anyone selling game item for Bitcoin. Black market has already moved to much more anonymous cryptocurrencies such as Monero. Bitcoin (not Bitcoin Cash) is the most popular cryptocurrency right now so you can pay with it in much more places than with others. Steam supports Bitcoin but not through BitPay as they used to, there are some kind of coupons on the external site which you can use on steam. Anyway, there are services which offer you to transfer money anywhere for BTC, at least in my country.