My brief experience with crypto involved the couple hundred bucks in Stellar/Lumen/whatever-its-called that the peddlers of that crypto coin gave for free to established Keybase users a while ago. I spent many hours trying to figure out how to convert them into real money without giving my government ID to some sketchy crypto companies, to no avail.
Yes, I know, KYC. But still, what struck me as interesting is, there is tons of first and third-party guides and articles on everything you can do with those Stellar/Lumen coins, except the one thing that I'd think most unwilling recipients are interested in: how to cash it out and forget about it. It's like this part of the crypto space (and I suspect most of the entire ecosystem, really) is heavily biased towards ingesting money. It feels like videogame virtual money you can buy, but not sell.
Usually, you can't buy money with a credit card. That's a personal loan, and has higher rates. None of the major US banks allow buying crypto with a credit card.[1] Debit cards, yes.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/buy-crypto-with-...
Does anybody take statements like this seriously any more? I realise if you're spruiking a crypto product you need to have at least drunk some of the koolaid, but are we still pretending that blockchains are actually useful constructs?
Now ... if there was just a killer app that was actually useful ;)
This is just Stripe trying to get on the NFT bandwagon (too late by the way). They'll probably close this service in 2 years.
To some extent they should be able to do this internally, when cash flows balance out.
"Overall, we maintain fundamental optimism about how crypto can help to facilitate a more globally accessible financial services ecosystem."
Sure; either that or the tasty 5% fee from the example flow?
The idea of a free-as-in-freedom, flexible, secure, and more democratic and independent payment system seems quite attractive.
At the same time I seem to see mainly examples of high-to-extreme volatility, fraud, technical and regulatory exclusion and suppression, and a total lack of real-world practicality.
I am quite sure my view is skewed.
If you have used crypto currencies in real life, ideally for more than speculative investment, would you be willing to share (parts of) the experience? I'd be very curious to learn more about this part of the puzzle of crypto.
How did you acquire crypto? What did you use it for? How did you feel about the transaction? Would you do it again?
Or anything else you'd like to share for that matter.
Merchants seamlessly convert crypto back to USD and cash it out.
So what is the point of crypto again other than giving Stripe (and similar centralized providers) a needless cut?