Monday, 18 January 2021

The issue with payment coins

I've been watching this space (mostly from distance) for years now.

The debate that kept my attention especially during the course of the last decade was whether bitcoin should mostly be a mean of exchange or a store of value, the part of ther community that thought that it whould be the new cash lessened the restrictions on the block size's hardcap and the others merely said that it is an important part for the continuation of the project (because it causes high fees, which according to them is a feature not a bug as it makes the coins harder to move / easier to store value on).

By having started using some of those coins more and more in my professional life, during the course of the last year, I realize that payment coins , i.e. coins designed to be used for payments are not very attractive for me to use simply because stable coins are better at it. Sure some of them are clear scams (USDT anyone) but others seem (way) more legitimate (Maker DAO's DAI comes to mind as it requires real collateral so that to be generated).

On asking others (who have also started integrating either crypto payments or smart contracts in their workflow), I can see the sentiment is pretty unanimous. Stable coins are preferable for crypto-crypto payments despite the often higher fees (if they run on ETH, however they can also run on alternative networks or secondary chains).

Which (to me at least) starts showing a more definitive answer on what Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin (also XRP, nano and similar) can do in the post corona -more mainstream crypto- world that is probably coming.

Or to put it in other words (it seems to me) that Bitcoin Core saved itself from irrelevancy almost by accident. By making the transfer fees prohibitively expensive, people would move less of it (on average) which actually disallowed it being used as cash and therefore disallowing it from having to compete with the stable coins.

In this -coming- changing environment what (do you think) the future of Bitcoin Cash should be? I realize that for the last year or so only had to use it once (it was a small payment outside the confines of a single network or a secondary chain -say a centralized exchange), so to me at least it is a pretty niche use case.

But I would be very interested to know what the community's view on it is? Is there a future to payment coins (such as bitcoin cash) and if so how can it take form going forwards?

submitted by /u/Steven81
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/kzqkpz/the_issue_with_payment_coins/

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