Crypto-Currencies as Medium of Payment
Suggested Duration: 2 to 5 minutes
BitShares Blockchain Foundation posted an article highlighting the benefits of a stable digital token as a medium of exchange.
A well-known obstacle to greater adoption of crypto-currencies like BTC as a medium of payment is the high volatility of its exchange value, due to its limited supply. As a consequence, the unit price varies (sometimes significantly) over short periods of time. This makes BTC unpractical for merchants that need to pay their suppliers in cash - especially in bearish markets where this currency risk can ruin a business.
The article then goes on to highlight three concepts that maintain a peg.
- Asset-backed Peg (e.g. USDT backed by an IOU)
- Liquidity-backed Peg (e.g. NuBits backed by BTC)
- Market-backed Peg (e.g. bitCNY backed by BTS)
This is an interesting topic for discussion for sure, BTC is useless as a currency now. LTC and BCH are more stable (and faster) but will still go though periods of volatility (and long confirmation periods) making them still more difficult than "fiat" for flat priced payments. It would be cool to have a set of dynamic plugin/widgets created that are open-sourced that people/businesses can add to their websites that keep a semi-realitime adjusted calculation on a specific crypto they store wants to accepts that ties into the checkout process would be good. The vendor still has the risk of what if tomorrow that coin/token is worth less, but I think in time as this all matures price volatility will relax and become more of a slow and steady increase over time.
Having a pegging asset is always interesting, but in the end that pays homage to the very thing crypto is trying to break away from long term and all these connections we hear about with VISA, etc is just putting the power and trade profits back in their hands.
In any event, whatever is used for commerce needs to be based on a better/faster transaction network like Bitshares. After all, 3 seconds is comparable to waiting for the stupid chip card verification we have now at checkout.
Thanks Taco for another great set of topics.