Thursday, February 24, 2022

Privacy and crypto-payments

Regarding the crypto cards post I would like to highlight two comments:

u/Maxx3141 comment:

This is a workaround, and nothing else - couldn't be farer away of what crypto should be.

u/Successful-Whole4307 comment:

Wasn't crypto supposed to be a trustless, decentralized peer to peer payment system?

Both highlight the same idea: the point of crypto is P2P payments. Crypto has many purposes other than as a payment system. But I think this is a good opportunity to discuss this potential use or purpose of crypto.

IMHO: the point of crypto is removing middlemen, and the main middlemen to remove for Bitcoin are in the FED, not in VISA or MasterCard.

However, VISA and MasterCard might be middlemen to remove with crypto as well. This seems to be a somewhat general perception, as one could assume from previous comments and the upvotes to u/Dinafem_shib's comment.

Let's give that a second thought: imagine that any shop or business with physical presence, e.g. a restaurant, accepts crypto payments. Would you pay with your crypto wallet disclosing your public address and all your transparently public transactions with that wallet? Is this the mainstream adoption that you want?

Paying with a card allows the card companies to have that information, which is not great, but at least limits who has that information, the middleman is a firewall as well. Other than that, paying with cash is the least revealing approach. From u/xavierwest888 post:

[Cash] is the perfect privacy solution. I've been able to buy all sorts of dodgy shit lately and no one knows!

Including cash, and until crypto is minted in a physical support, I think we have covered the main options available nowadays. It is your time to vote and discuss:

Do you want to remove credit or debit card middlemen from your life, or you appreciate the partial privacy that they provide to you?

View Poll


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