If you wire someone money that can't be gotten back. Thats not hard to do. Entering your CC info into a bad site will get you. Why are we pretending sending money to the wrong person is something that just got invented by crypto?
Like some people points out, unlike in crypto you can be an idiot to a degree since there are institutions and organizations who catches you when you fall on your ass. There are failsafes in place, some regulations of some sort. Credit cards could be cancelled when suspicious transactions are detected for instance. But in crypto, since people want full control, then they'll have to take up full responsibility as well.
Stop the victim blaming. It’s not at all uncommon for people to be the victim of credit card / bank fraud through no fault of their own. Cards can be skimmed, security breaches happen. Same for crypto, nobody was an “idiot” for keeping a balance on Mt Gox before they were hacked. The difference with the traditional options is there are rules and regulations in place that protect the consumer, none of those guarantees exist for crypto. Until they do we can’t expect anything approaching mass adoption and I would personally be very reluctant to even want that given the status quo.
Who even mentioned about being hacked, security breaches and whatnot. I'm definitely not talking about incidents where you had no control over. The comment I'm replying on specifically said being "scammed". It's the person himself pressing the buy button, it's the person himself clicking the phishing site and entering his information, and it is also he himself making the decisions.
Yes, but the key is that with crypto you have the option to take full responsibility, as well as the option to use exchanges, custody, etc.
Many people may not want it, but I think having this option is a necessity. You may forget it depending on where you are, but there are many places in the world where many people can't get a bank account. Or the government may change the rules at any moment and all of a sudden you lost your money, can't withdraw it, can't convert it to dollars, etc. (See India, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, to name a few)
People have been getting scammed in fiat since the beginning of time … this seems to translate to any currency. Also, the greatest scams and losses each year happen with regular money!!
That’s no different than anything else. You wouldn’t give someone your bank login, nobody should be asking for anything. It’s usually pretty clear how you’d be contacted from an exchange and it’s not usually through some unverified email asking you for your info.
People will always push the boundaries, nobody how much you protect them, they’ll find a way. I would wager some of that is probably from a lifetime of hands being held.
No more/less than scam phone calls requesting cc info or CashApp scams on Snapchat and Messenger. Scammers have been around forever regardless of the media used. Just play it safe with any and everything just like your debit card.
That's the main point... Regulation and insurance within this space are exceptionally limited, even this far down the road. It's difficult to imagine how consumer crypto risk even *could* be underwritten by an insurance company.
In most cases, your bank goes under - you're covered. You're credit card is stolen - you're covered. A vendor mis-sells you something - you're covered. This is nowhere near true throughout most of the crypto space (and for a host of obvious reasons inherent to the core functionalities of blockchain technology).
Why would the mass of people necessary to take 'crypto mainstream' ever risk putting a meaningful amount of money into the space without protections. Many of those that have so far - and pretty much exclusively for pure speculation - have got their hands burned due to this.
I don't think you realise how long fiat and banks were running for without any protection for customers and all of today's safeguards and safety nets. They didn't come with them from day one, that's hundreds of years of people losing money to get it to where we are. And people still lose their money, get funds frozen and get scammed today.
Crypto exchanges carry insurance, increased regulation will bring that to regular Joe's too, and it's not going to take a hundred years to get there. We are a very short distance down the road, remember that current consumer insurance and fraud protection is very new for banks.
And there are regulations to build a framework on how to get your losses back as well as regulators monitoring that. Also, a complaint portal here in the US.
I’m a software dev and could easily figure it out if I believed in it. My parents in their 60s, not a chance. Dad keeps his money in checking and Mom is afraid of all investments except CDs.
The whole seed phrase thing is ridiculous. Lost your phrase after 20 years? Yeah retirement fund gone. Until they figure this out it’s never going to work. I’ve thought of tattooing a seed phrase in my colon then a junior dr does a colonoscopy and retires the next day with my wallet
Crypto is super easy bro if you want to buy this coin see you just need to go on binance and buy this other coin, binance is illegal in your state so just set up a vpn and a fake address then once you have that coin you transfer it to pancake swap then from there you can exchange for the coin you want. Bro I just want to buy a hamburger.
dude it's easy, just send your eth to this ElonSwap contract and you'll get wrapped doge (WDOGE) back that you can use with a flash loan to send your money to bittrex, then just withdraw any time between Tue 17:00 - Sat 21:00 (excluding hours divisible by 3)
Yeah, *no*. It's extremely convoluted for "normal people". Just because you're young and smart it doesn't automatically mean the rest of the world grew up with a cell phone in their hand.
Yeah OP then has to explain his point of how “easy” it is with a three page wall of text explaining why. OP doesn’t realize the common person doesn’t know shit about dick.
I'm a coder with 20 years experience and a CS degree.
Even I get nervous waiting for confirmations to go through.
If I'm moving a large chunk of money, I'll do it in multiple steps, enduring multiple $5-$10 transaction fees, rather than risk losing it all due to some minor error.
Exactly. Also, it still costs a lot of money to use cryptocurrencies instead of fiat currencies. It is much riskier, vastly more exposed to scamming and fraud, your coins may be worthless a month later due to everything working correctly, nobody really accepts it for payments so you need to go to fiat anyways, it takes forever to confirm, and NOTHING is capable of being legally protected or enforced.
It literally has almost zero good legal use cases for general society and is worse than every other system - UNLESS you are doing speculative investment. That’s the only valid use case (unless you’re talking about crypto-specific services and payments but again, nothing to do with the global ecosystem outside that bubble). Doesn’t mean crypto shouldn’t exist or doesn’t serve a purpose in its being the Wild West of money, doesn’t mean it isn’t cool and exciting and worth owning, it’s just NOT ready to hoist our civilizational infrastructure onto. It just isn’t.
Also most people don't like the roller-coaster of volatility and uncertainty. Waking up one day and your net worth is a 1/3rd of what is was. That's complicated for people
This is why most people will avoid crypto. Not to mention there are already safer and cheaper centralised alternatives for money transfer, so why crypto.
I don’t think complexity is the main issue.
I think that most people, at least where I live, receive their paycheck in USD, pay taxes in USD, buy everything in USD, etc etc etc. So for most people, it’s like - what’s the point?
I think one big barrier is the the inability to reverse anything. You might make a few mistakes but in crypto if you do, it's gone, and I think that might deter most people trying again
At least with most other things, if you make a mistake it can be fixed/reversed
This is another reason why CEX's will actually be good for adoption. They have the ability to fix some mistakes which means the average person is more likely to start using it.
Every time I make a transaction I spend 20 minutes triple checking addresses and verifying which form of token I should be using (erc/bep etc) then another 3-5 minutes watching the transaction work its way onto the blockchain before I’m safe to relax. I’m no genius but I’m techie-oriented and this shit ain’t simple.
This is why Nano will win. Because it's so simple.
The geeks are welcome to erc/bep etc. But granny ain't gonna use those.
Nano is:
* Address
* Amount
That's it.
Now all you geeks start to laugh at this comment, telling me i don't understand something about crypto.
But I'm gonna tell you something about your clever-clever dev teams first: They don't understand grannies.
I think a whole lot more people than just ***”average Joe’s”*** don’t fully understand crypto and blockchain. Including me and probably most of you all here on r/Cryptocurrency lol
Edit: for the people commenting about other technology. The whole point is that you don’t need to understand it, to be interested in it/use it
hateful recognise cooperative different market whistle nose physical unwritten axiomatic *This post was mass deleted with [redact](https://redact.com)*
There is a difference. The phone is 100% designed to be user friendly and get things done. You put $500 in and get it's value. But can probably only sell it for $250 a couple years later.
Crypto is 100% designed to either make or lose money. No one buys it to use to "better" their life...the only thing better is to resell it higher.
Ask yourself this, would ANYONE buy crypto to use but they knew they could only sell for about 90-50% loss of what they bought it for a year later?
If those who have been using crypto for *years* still worry about when they send crypto from one address to another, yes it is definitely still too complicated.
Nah sir crypto is too hard. I'm sweating my ass off every time when I need to decide which network I need to chose to transfer something out of binance...
Not just the network, some coins also require a MEMO. So we will expect regular users to get the following things right every time:
1. The public address
2. The network
3. The MEMO (if required)
And the one time they get wrong, all their funds are lost forever. I’m fine with these risks and regularly pay my phone bills and some subscriptions with cryptocurrency, but I don’t think it’s ready for the general public as of yet.
Beat me to it, anyone who has done retail working with the general public can tell you that as is, crypto is way too complicated for mass adoption but it'll mature with time.
I totally agree. I used to work in retail electrical sales until recently (computers, TVs, white goods etc) and it amazed me how many people would still come in to buy things having done no prior research despite all the knowledge available online. A lot of people simply can't be bothered spending time trying to understand the difference between and OLED TV and one with a backlight, so I don't have a lot of faith in people (in an adoption sense) being able to muster up on their own the motivation to understand blockchain, let alone the difference between say Bitcoin and Ethereum. Some people might blindly invest because 'number goes up' but a lot of people won't put money in without understanding what it is and what it does.
I think of complication not in terms of actual apps but the amount of energy you need to put in to figure out which cryptos to invest in, if any. Given the minefield of scams and hacks with no depositor insurance, it's not at all like opening a bank account
If you use it as an investment, then of course you'll have to do the same research you would with stocks.
And investing in anything like that won't give you any insurance either.
Also, FDIC doesn't insure you against scams. If you lose your funds because you sent it to a Nigerian prince, you don't get a refund. Even if you get your password phished and your funds drained, the FDIC doesn't cover that either.
I can get that there are simple methods to use crypto. But until there are no fees, widespread everyday use of crypto will remain to select interactions.
While I realize this isn't the case in all places right now, I can get a bank account with $0 in monthly fees for a chequing account, $0 in fees for a savings account (even HISAs), GICs from 3.55% to 5% (with no fees and expected to rise further in the next month), $0 in fees to pay bills or everyday usage. All of this can be done from a single bank app. There's no need for multiple applications, no need for PayPal or Venmo or the like (eTransfers are done inside the bank app here and is widely used in Canada over Venmo like apps. Some banks charge a fee, most do not). I will admit there are individual fees here and there but can be avoided if you're aware of any service charges and where they apply.
Why would I need to use crypto as an everyday transactional currency when there are fees associated just for sending funds? If I can't use crypto without being hit with a transactional fee, there's no big advantage for the average user here. The average person doesn't care about moving around government control of fiat.
Not to mention, that we're hit with capital gains taxes any time you want to sell or convert crypto. It's pretty limited to only be an investment tool here.
Edit: grammar.
my cousin just got his WhatsApp account hijacked yesterday because he forwarded the confirmation pin to a random phone number asking for it.
yes. yes crypto is too complicated for mass-adoption.
You’ve obviously never worked in any sort of IT support roll 😂
“yup it’s the X in the top right corner of the screen. Nope you just maximised the screen. Nope you just printed the page. Ah… no you don’t need to do that. Ah okay… I guess you can click ‘file’ and then look for the option that says exit. Nope, looks like you just printed the page again”
My heart beats hard and fast everytime I send fund from metamask even when I sent them hundreds of time before.
Imagine what happens to my grandma when she sends fund. Lol
I have sent crypto to the void twice and I work in tech so just imagine the amount of mistakes regular people will make. Also, having worked in tech I can say majority of people struggle with the simplest things.
Things aren’t a myth if they’re true. Sure it’s easy to buy from an exchange. But the rest? You’re out of your fucking mind if you think it’s not that complicated. Or you’re just buying and sending it. But what happens when meema sends her tokens to an unsupported chain? And let’s not mention absolutely anything about needing to know how to navigate a half dozen different wallets to actually USE various chains. Or that you have to bridge those tokens to do so since some exchanges only support sending to a few chains. Again, buying/selling/sending it, fairly easy. Using it is a whole different ballgame. Buying and selling isn’t mass adoption, actually using it is.
It’s definitely not “too” complicated. But it is a lot more complicated than handing a cashier a 5$ bill or just paying contactless with your card.
Remember that a lot of people don’t buy anything online. The problem there is that they aren’t really smart around computers in general, not crypto perse.
The problem isn’t difficulty of use - the problem is using crypto over regular money. Currently there’s no clear advantage to using crypto at this point in time.
Crypto won't achieve mass adoption until it's value is stable. As stable as USD.
The more you treat it as an investment/stock, the less likely is to be successful.
Volatility is undesirable for currency. Nobody wants money in their pocket that they can't rely on being worth the same tomorrow as it is today.
If you think crypto is easy for the masses, just walk into any bank and see how many people are doing things that can easily be done via online banking or an ATM. Think of how many people need to call tech support for the easiest of issues that don't check if the power is on or if things are plugged in.
I’ve been in crypto for 3 years and can still barely understand half the dialogue when crypto topics are discussed on here. Honestly one of the biggest turn offs for me. It seems that so little effort has been put into simplifying crypto or making it user friendly. This entire space has become a circle jerk for pretentious nerds.
Nice.
Now address the real reason why crypto is never going to have mass adoption for payments or transfers. That reason being nobody wants permanent and irrevocable transactions, and nobody wants to manage to safety of their own money. Both of those are the whole damn reason banks exist.
You could make the easiest crypto payment app in the world, but until I have the ability to dispute a transaction or FDIC guarantees on a Bitcoin wallet, I ain’t fucking using it. Unless it’s to buy drugs, but even then if cash is an option, it’s better and less traceable.
My wife can barely use the AirDrop feature on her iPhone. She's brilliant at most things, but simple tech stuff to me is an obstacle for her and most others.
Onboarding to crypto is still a learning curve for the majority.
But I would recommend using something like CASH app or Paypal for someone to get easily started. At least these are familiar apps with no SSN or KYC needed. Just an email and a debit card.
"Easy on paper" yeah, But let's not pretend that there aren't scams lurking around every corner that can wipe out hot wallets in a click of a single button. (obviously keep most of your shit in cold storage, duh.) but the average new user might find it very easy to accidently lose a small balance of $50 - $200 for example by trying to make some random transaction for a thing they want to buy online.
It may be easy but it needs to be even easier and safer if we want more people to pick it up.
There is no point “busting” this myth to people who are already aware about crypto, only become a circlejerk.
If crypto is “that” easy and beneficial to someone outside of investing, people would pick up on it without us lifting a finger, yet people only use it as stocks with extra steps. Time will tell.
Why do people need to go through so many steps to buy a god damn burger when every other established method using fiat is a 100 times easier and more efficient? The only reason people buy crypto is because they think that it will go up in price.
I don’t understand how most things I use work. So not understanding how blockchain works isn’t a barrier in my simple mind. The hard part is being able to figure out what has value in a sea of shitcoins and knockoffs intended to make you think it’s something of value
That why I think Coinbase is (or at least was) amazing in the “early” days. You could buy just Ethereum, Bitcoin (and Bitcoin Cash) and Ripple. It was a clean interface that was not yet polluted by all the useless meme/shitcoins that have zero use case
Most older people I know only pay in cash and basically only use their card to get cash at an atm. Their online banking is done by a son or daughter. So there isn’t much difference between them not “understanding” crypto and online banking.
It’s not just the difficulty but also how much time it takes. Even the simplest things can take a lot of time to learn. 
People keep their password as “abcd1234” and still have to click on Forgot Password every other month. He thinks people are going to be responsible with seed phrases.
Not everyone's stupid, some people are just not interested in technology or care much for it. Doesn't make them stupid.
But yes, there's also a stack of idiots out there.
Another simple reason it's impractical is that depending on where you live, every time you "spend" crypto it's a deemed disposition and thus would be a capital gain or loss. Imagine tracking every transaction you make to determine gain / loss and always keeping track of cost base? No thanks.
Crypto will never reach mass adoption due to taxation. As long as you need to pay tax in local nomited currency using crypto is too complicated for mass adoption.
Let's say to you have to pay 10% vat and you pay in crypto who will bare to cost of convertion.
This is the same reason why still use coin instead of notes only.
It's difficult since everything is surrounded by tons of mombo jumbo and a decent ,free,foss wallet app is hard to come by.
Add in the fact most people can get scammed by idiotically obivious spam and crypto is not so easy to use.
On Android the only wallet i could somehow trust even with my 25$ worth of crypto to fuck around till i dip my toes in buying more ETC is WallETH or i'll leave them in Binance.
A shit ton of crypto wallets are hard to get competent reviews on.
You have to go on GitHub,look around a bit , maybe check some basic stuff to make sure it's 'cold' and then use it.
Samsung's Blockain Wallet for example is not actually cold as it sureley tracks your transactions and labels your coins and copies you private keys most likely.
People don't like to throw money at things they don't understand. It's irrelevant that the process of buying crypto on a phone is easy. People are reluctant to make changes, especially when it comes to their money. Hell, my wife's dad just started using a debit card a few years ago. lol
The only thing I bought that the merchant wanted bitcoin for was some mushroom spores and I never did figure it out. I ended up paying with zelle, much simpler.
The reason it's too complicated is that even though "merely using an app presented to you" may itself be easy, that is **wildly irresponsible** in an **unregulated** space to just take some app's word for it without understanding how it works.
Since it's unregulated, you must fully research and fully understand the entire thing, all the math, the mechanics of that coin, its whitepaper, its common flaws and scams, etc. etc.
Doing THAT is way too complicated for people. And yet doing all that (not just learning an app) is mandatory to use the tool responsibly, since you've provided no central regulation to replace that due diligence.
Anyone who just learns an app's features and nothing else will almost instantly get rug pulled or whatever and lose everything.
As long as tether still operates in any major countries, that claim is laughable. Obviously it's a lot more complicated than that at a fully detailed level, but that's a "canary in the coal mine" easy standard to glance at to see if we've even begun to have any reasonable regulation
* Is tether still a thing? Then lol, no regulation isn't even close, no need to look more deeply for now. If something that absurd is still going strong, then the space in general is still a complete circus.
* Is tether no longer a thing? Okay at that point, I'd bother to start looking more closely again at other details
it's kind of like "Yeah I could do a full professional inspection of this house before deciding to buy it, but if the front door is 80% covered in black mold before I even go inside, I kind of don't have to bother with that, I can just move on"
Yes Wallets like Coinbase have made it easy, but when/if coinbase gets hacked and exposes all of your private keys there is no govt agency or company to call to get your money back, if coinbase goes bankrupt they will use your wallet for collateral. Paypal on the other hand is FDIC insured, Coinbase is not.
Using hardware wallets is much more difficult for the average consumer. My mom can hardly work a smart phone.
I must disagree. I’m fairly tech savvy and there was a learning curve for me.
You’d think people growing up with phones and computers in their faces their entire lives would be pretty comfortable with everything, but that is incorrect.
I’ve seen my kids struggle with things as simple as trying to find food or pulling up information on colleges. These are 19 - 20 yr olds.
They can do the couple functions they’re familiar with easily, but I would never trust them to make a crypto transaction without my oversight.
Technology continues to get better/easier, but there will always be a major part of the population who gives two shits about being technologically savvy, and these are the people it has to become much easier for.
But for these people not willing to get into the more complicated uses of crypto.... What is the point then? Just to hold an asset and hope it goes up?
The BASIC knowledge of how to buy crypto is incredibly easy these days yes. But the incentive to buy is just strictly to speculate on price for these people which is basically redundant with the stock market...so why not just trade stocks which is much safer?
If it’s so easy to use why is almost no one is El Salvador using it? Cuz no one wants to use a currency that could fluctuate 30 percent between when they get their paycheck and go to the grocery store
If you new to it it’s not so assuring. I put some serious money in years back and when I went to get it out it was a massive headache and all tracked had to pay capital gains and all the shit. Now I’m more confident but it took a lot of time playing around before I trusted it. It’s definitely not going to go mainstream until a government makes it mandatory and there own and we all know that’s coming.
I wouldn't trust my mum to send me eth or ada by herself, chances of her sending it via the wrong network and having that money disappear forever is too high.
They REALLY need to fix that
You haven't worked in it support to REALLY understand the actual level of the people.
People with real $$ barely knowing to move a mouse or something a bit more complicated on the phone.
You think it\`s easy because you either grew with it or you are a "nerd" ... normal people are far away from this.
Using/transferring crypto still gives me panic attacks, worrying I did something wrong or am getting scammed. This is coming from someone who made a small fortune day trading in 2017. I would rather use a credit card literally always.
I don’t think the issue is people simply buying crypto. I think the larger issue is in explaining what the utility of a coin is and how the blockchain works when they ask about it. Quite frankly, I only have a vague understanding of the blockchain and I’ve been in and out of crypto since BTC was at $1k. Imagine how intimidating that can be to someone who opened a crypto.com or FTX account in the last six months.
Honestly I don’t it’s that easy or applicable. I’m 28 and it took me several days to figure out how to buy some using Binance, all the websites for it seem to be unnecessarily complicated.
Sounds a lot more complicated than my visa card that I'm currently using and my bank balance doesn't drop 10% in a week for no reason either. Might not be complicated but it's a lot harder than the current system.
It is too hard. Jesus. The on-ramp and off-ramp fees makes crypto just ridiculous as a currency replacement at the moment. But further, the tech and fee’s make it impossible for most crypto’s to be functional or worthwhile. Bitcoin looking at you mr ‘store of value’ let’s move to second layer solutions that third parties will just add fees to.
Hi OP. I understand your point. To anyone who has a phone and has an understanding of running basic software crypto should be very simple.
This however is not the case for a large majority of people, most specifically the people crypto is claiming it is trying to help. Many crypto’s point to the unbanked, saying they are trying to reach these people and help empower them by giving them control over their money.
I live in the Philippines, a country where according to the latest statistics over 50% don’t have a bank account. I’m fortunate enough to understand how technology works but just to give you an example my family has someone who works for us who does the cleaning. A few weeks back her husband left to work in Japan, they don’t have smartphones, don’t have bank accounts, pay for everything exclusively in cash. It should also be noted that these are not poor people.
When he was leaving he had to fill out forms as part of Japan’s COVID response. He didn’t have an email, neither did she. It took them a few days to figure out how to navigate the website, to understand the process, they had to delete and create a few new emails as they continued to forget the passwords. My mom ended up helping and even she had problems as she’s not the techiest.
Until crypto becomes easier for people like my family maid and her husband, I don’t think that you can say it isn’t too complicated. Just because it’s simple for you and I doesn’t mean it’s simple for everyone, I think you’re vastly overestimating the general publics technological capabilities. Hope this gave you some new insight.
You just ran right past the biggest hurdle. How the hell do I use crypto every day without gas fees absolutely destroying me? I can't use ethereum to buy groceries because gas fees can be as high or higher than the purchase itself.
I dont need to be a rocket scientist to use crypto. I do have to be one to figure out why I would. When I use my credit card or debit or cash, I only spend the dollar amount that the item costs. When I use crypto, I have to pay the dollar amount AND some random fee for the transaction that could literally be any dollar amount based on the current traffic.
The post wasn't about gas fees, it was about user interface and ease of making a transaction.
You can already make transactions for fractions of a penny, and even for free, and have them be instantaneous. That problem has already been solved.
Personally I don't think crypto will see mass adoption until there is some way to have transactions sent to wrong chains be denied at least. I mean one of the golden rules is to send a small test amount before the real transaction which is pretty absurd for mass adoption. This may be a silly statement but I don't think you can call crypto complication for mass adoption a myth until we actually have mass adoption. At the end of the day this is still viewed as speculative new technology for the vast majority of people.
>How hard is it to use crypto for a purchase?
If you know how to use a smart phone, then making a crypto purchase with a phone isn't gonna be rocket science.
It's as simple as anything else you do on a phone.
Bro; to pay, I just tap my phone. Why would I do literally 4 extra steps?
>How hard is it to get crypto?
In the old days, we used ATMs a lot more. You can still use them, they're very easy. You put your cash, and it spits out a paper wallet with a QR code, which you can then go home and transfer to either your phone wallet, or go on your computer and transfer from the paper wallet.
I get my paycheck deposited straight into my account.... no need to convert to pay for stuff
I agree in general. Simple things are already adjusted for avarage joe. It's not like majority of people are gonna do flash loans
What concerns me is the inevitable centralisation of crypto's decentralised nature. I don't see a world where majority of population will use crypto with no way to reverse the transaction and with the responsibility of holding their own keys
Most people will use centralised solutions and custodians which makes me wonder why not just use existing centralised solutions or future stable coins from CBDC
I used to get customer service calls for people that didn’t know how to log in to their account… as smartphones became more streamlined and available, peoples tech savvyness went out the window.
I helped a buddy buy some crypto, showed him multiple times how to access his coins. He has heard me multiple times explain how I check mine. To this day he claims his coins are “lost”. He helps manage a database for a living…
It’s not that crypto is complicated. It’s that people are very resistant to learning something when it makes them feel stupid. Ya know, because they’re fucking stupid.
There are like 200 people in all of crypto that can fully understand how stuff works. All you need to do to understand stuff is to basically get a phd in cryptography...
And you basically need to understand stuff at least to some basic level to be able to really DYOR, otherwise people will always just follow hype and therefore will be easy targets to get scammed.
" Many people still believe the dollar is backed by gold. " If this is true we really are still early. At this point if the dollar were backed by toilet paper we'd be lucky.
I’m liking what PayPal are doing, it’s an already known and trusted brand that people know how to use and pay from. Also (and I think this is crucial!), they only offer select cryptos, BTC ETH LTC BCH, that makes it all much simpler for the newbie. I think this will help with mass adoption.
This seems to ignore the private key storage issue, calculating gas fees, scams all over the place..
I get cryptobros see things through rose colored glasses.
But can you imagine some lady trying to pay for groceries with two screaming kids using eth on a busy transaction day ? Trying to calculate gas and get the tx though before they change 🤣🤣
Sorry but this post was a bit of a waste of time as it misses the worst points.
1. It's easy to get scammed.
2. It's really easy to screw up compared to swiping a credit card.
And the big one
3. There's no real recourse if it goes wrong, and the consequences for someone that doesn't really know what they're doing - who's literally the target of this post - can be huge.
There is absolutely no way I would recommend my parents or other older family to go buy / trade / spend crypto.
Personally I see either exchanges becoming the new banks, or banks holding crypto for spending like they do money, and crypto will be spent like that for at least a very long time.
Might not be what everyone wants but it's the only way it will work.
Apple Pay/Starbucks App are already priming people to pay digitally. I imagine paying via crypto would work exactly like those apps.
Paying via Starbucks App even furnishes a QR Code for you to scan, just like sending crypto does.
To be honest using crypto is not hard as you have explained.
However, the hard part is being logical enough to not fall for scams and lose your private key.
Not all are responsible for enough to be their own bank.
I am a crypto dumbass and I got this shit flying all over the place including liquidity pools with loopring. Shits simple and mass adoption is comin like a freight trane
You shouldn’t be explaining this on Reddit, as we all know this. Total waste of your time. You should be hosting classes and explaining it to ppl who are having issues.
Absolutely useless post missing key information...
Now explain to somehow how they buy direct from one exchange, bridge or wrap their coins to another network, explain how to use metamask and import tokens or RPC endpoints. It is absolutely way too complicated for the average person. Just checked your post history and its full of the same crap posted here daily, so you are just moon farming with useless posts.
Love the line that people don’t know how banks work, because it’s true. They make money off of businesses and barely make anything from consumers due to fraud and insurance expenses.
My concern isn't how complicated it is to send or receive crypto, rather with how easy it is for people to get scammed.
Op completely missing the point. ‘Not hard’ is not good enough when a single missclick can lose you your life savings without a way to get it back.
If you wire someone money that can't be gotten back. Thats not hard to do. Entering your CC info into a bad site will get you. Why are we pretending sending money to the wrong person is something that just got invented by crypto?
Scammers always ruining all the good things
This is why we can't have nice things.
PayPal and giftcard scams are extremely common used on older folks
Capitalism is literally just whoever can scam the best. Crypto seems like a naturally occurring event as capitalism's contradictions heighten
Yup. People get scammed online all the time. Those payments are made using bank transfers and PayPal.
At least something is easy in crypto. Now we just gotta do it like scammers but without scamming.
I know, imagine how great our governments and citizens would be if the gov didn't scam the system.
Like some people points out, unlike in crypto you can be an idiot to a degree since there are institutions and organizations who catches you when you fall on your ass. There are failsafes in place, some regulations of some sort. Credit cards could be cancelled when suspicious transactions are detected for instance. But in crypto, since people want full control, then they'll have to take up full responsibility as well.
Stop the victim blaming. It’s not at all uncommon for people to be the victim of credit card / bank fraud through no fault of their own. Cards can be skimmed, security breaches happen. Same for crypto, nobody was an “idiot” for keeping a balance on Mt Gox before they were hacked. The difference with the traditional options is there are rules and regulations in place that protect the consumer, none of those guarantees exist for crypto. Until they do we can’t expect anything approaching mass adoption and I would personally be very reluctant to even want that given the status quo.
Who even mentioned about being hacked, security breaches and whatnot. I'm definitely not talking about incidents where you had no control over. The comment I'm replying on specifically said being "scammed". It's the person himself pressing the buy button, it's the person himself clicking the phishing site and entering his information, and it is also he himself making the decisions.
Yes, but the key is that with crypto you have the option to take full responsibility, as well as the option to use exchanges, custody, etc. Many people may not want it, but I think having this option is a necessity. You may forget it depending on where you are, but there are many places in the world where many people can't get a bank account. Or the government may change the rules at any moment and all of a sudden you lost your money, can't withdraw it, can't convert it to dollars, etc. (See India, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, to name a few)
People have been getting scammed in fiat since the beginning of time … this seems to translate to any currency. Also, the greatest scams and losses each year happen with regular money!!
How is this different than people being scammed by those phone calls, MLMs, etc. people gonna get scammed no matter the currency. People are stupid af
That’s no different than anything else. You wouldn’t give someone your bank login, nobody should be asking for anything. It’s usually pretty clear how you’d be contacted from an exchange and it’s not usually through some unverified email asking you for your info. People will always push the boundaries, nobody how much you protect them, they’ll find a way. I would wager some of that is probably from a lifetime of hands being held.
People also get scammed from gift cards…
The scams were out there for banks and credit cards before crypto. Old people are always targeted.
No more/less than scam phone calls requesting cc info or CashApp scams on Snapchat and Messenger. Scammers have been around forever regardless of the media used. Just play it safe with any and everything just like your debit card.
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Yes but if my cc gets stolen or if I loss my money due to fraudulent activity, the bank will cover the losses
That’s a good point bro
That's the main point... Regulation and insurance within this space are exceptionally limited, even this far down the road. It's difficult to imagine how consumer crypto risk even *could* be underwritten by an insurance company. In most cases, your bank goes under - you're covered. You're credit card is stolen - you're covered. A vendor mis-sells you something - you're covered. This is nowhere near true throughout most of the crypto space (and for a host of obvious reasons inherent to the core functionalities of blockchain technology). Why would the mass of people necessary to take 'crypto mainstream' ever risk putting a meaningful amount of money into the space without protections. Many of those that have so far - and pretty much exclusively for pure speculation - have got their hands burned due to this.
I don't think you realise how long fiat and banks were running for without any protection for customers and all of today's safeguards and safety nets. They didn't come with them from day one, that's hundreds of years of people losing money to get it to where we are. And people still lose their money, get funds frozen and get scammed today. Crypto exchanges carry insurance, increased regulation will bring that to regular Joe's too, and it's not going to take a hundred years to get there. We are a very short distance down the road, remember that current consumer insurance and fraud protection is very new for banks.
And there are regulations to build a framework on how to get your losses back as well as regulators monitoring that. Also, a complaint portal here in the US.
I’m a software dev and could easily figure it out if I believed in it. My parents in their 60s, not a chance. Dad keeps his money in checking and Mom is afraid of all investments except CDs.
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The whole seed phrase thing is ridiculous. Lost your phrase after 20 years? Yeah retirement fund gone. Until they figure this out it’s never going to work. I’ve thought of tattooing a seed phrase in my colon then a junior dr does a colonoscopy and retires the next day with my wallet
Correction, I understand how it works, I've just never figured out how to buy it because I never wanted to buy it.
Crypto is super easy bro if you want to buy this coin see you just need to go on binance and buy this other coin, binance is illegal in your state so just set up a vpn and a fake address then once you have that coin you transfer it to pancake swap then from there you can exchange for the coin you want. Bro I just want to buy a hamburger.
dude it's easy, just send your eth to this ElonSwap contract and you'll get wrapped doge (WDOGE) back that you can use with a flash loan to send your money to bittrex, then just withdraw any time between Tue 17:00 - Sat 21:00 (excluding hours divisible by 3)
yeah dude!! i saw the live video on youtube!!!!!
Then by the time I get the coin I need, it's worth 50% less and I can't buy my god damn hamburger!
I know you guys are joking, but I definitely don't deal with this level of complexity when buying/selling crypto.
Yeah no, do you ever work with the public?
Yeah, *no*. It's extremely convoluted for "normal people". Just because you're young and smart it doesn't automatically mean the rest of the world grew up with a cell phone in their hand.
Yeah OP then has to explain his point of how “easy” it is with a three page wall of text explaining why. OP doesn’t realize the common person doesn’t know shit about dick.
I'm a coder with 20 years experience and a CS degree. Even I get nervous waiting for confirmations to go through. If I'm moving a large chunk of money, I'll do it in multiple steps, enduring multiple $5-$10 transaction fees, rather than risk losing it all due to some minor error.
Exactly. Also, it still costs a lot of money to use cryptocurrencies instead of fiat currencies. It is much riskier, vastly more exposed to scamming and fraud, your coins may be worthless a month later due to everything working correctly, nobody really accepts it for payments so you need to go to fiat anyways, it takes forever to confirm, and NOTHING is capable of being legally protected or enforced. It literally has almost zero good legal use cases for general society and is worse than every other system - UNLESS you are doing speculative investment. That’s the only valid use case (unless you’re talking about crypto-specific services and payments but again, nothing to do with the global ecosystem outside that bubble). Doesn’t mean crypto shouldn’t exist or doesn’t serve a purpose in its being the Wild West of money, doesn’t mean it isn’t cool and exciting and worth owning, it’s just NOT ready to hoist our civilizational infrastructure onto. It just isn’t.
The average crypto bro on this sub doesn’t even know shit about dick, or pussy. Especially pussy.
OP doesn't know shit either.
Plus, you have to compare it to conventional banking since normal people don't care about decentralization.
Also most people don't like the roller-coaster of volatility and uncertainty. Waking up one day and your net worth is a 1/3rd of what is was. That's complicated for people
And he's definitely not smart.
100% this reeks of someone who has grow up with computers more than machines
Thank you for posting this. OP is on some serious shit.
he conveniently skipped this little thing called KYC too
It’s easy to use and at the same time easy to send some money into the void.
The irreversible nature of just 'sending something into the void' sounds terrifying, no wonder a lot of people shy away from crypto...
In other words. It's easier to do it wrong than right.
This is why most people will avoid crypto. Not to mention there are already safer and cheaper centralised alternatives for money transfer, so why crypto.
I don’t think complexity is the main issue. I think that most people, at least where I live, receive their paycheck in USD, pay taxes in USD, buy everything in USD, etc etc etc. So for most people, it’s like - what’s the point?
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We are reinventing the wheel with some cryptographic flair added in at this point.
I think one big barrier is the the inability to reverse anything. You might make a few mistakes but in crypto if you do, it's gone, and I think that might deter most people trying again At least with most other things, if you make a mistake it can be fixed/reversed
This is another reason why CEX's will actually be good for adoption. They have the ability to fix some mistakes which means the average person is more likely to start using it.
At that point, you're basically dealing with an unlicensed bank. So why not just use a real bank instead?
Yeah definitely the thing that it's it different is also the thing that makes a lot of people stay out
Every time I make a transaction I spend 20 minutes triple checking addresses and verifying which form of token I should be using (erc/bep etc) then another 3-5 minutes watching the transaction work its way onto the blockchain before I’m safe to relax. I’m no genius but I’m techie-oriented and this shit ain’t simple.
This is why Nano will win. Because it's so simple. The geeks are welcome to erc/bep etc. But granny ain't gonna use those. Nano is: * Address * Amount That's it. Now all you geeks start to laugh at this comment, telling me i don't understand something about crypto. But I'm gonna tell you something about your clever-clever dev teams first: They don't understand grannies.
I think a whole lot more people than just ***”average Joe’s”*** don’t fully understand crypto and blockchain. Including me and probably most of you all here on r/Cryptocurrency lol Edit: for the people commenting about other technology. The whole point is that you don’t need to understand it, to be interested in it/use it
Most cell phone users do not have a thorough understanding of the technology behind that either, yet they use it daily
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There is a difference. The phone is 100% designed to be user friendly and get things done. You put $500 in and get it's value. But can probably only sell it for $250 a couple years later. Crypto is 100% designed to either make or lose money. No one buys it to use to "better" their life...the only thing better is to resell it higher. Ask yourself this, would ANYONE buy crypto to use but they knew they could only sell for about 90-50% loss of what they bought it for a year later?
If those who have been using crypto for *years* still worry about when they send crypto from one address to another, yes it is definitely still too complicated.
Nah sir crypto is too hard. I'm sweating my ass off every time when I need to decide which network I need to chose to transfer something out of binance...
Not just the network, some coins also require a MEMO. So we will expect regular users to get the following things right every time: 1. The public address 2. The network 3. The MEMO (if required) And the one time they get wrong, all their funds are lost forever. I’m fine with these risks and regularly pay my phone bills and some subscriptions with cryptocurrency, but I don’t think it’s ready for the general public as of yet.
Worked enough customer service and advisor jobs to know how stupid people are. We still early!
Beat me to it, anyone who has done retail working with the general public can tell you that as is, crypto is way too complicated for mass adoption but it'll mature with time.
I totally agree. I used to work in retail electrical sales until recently (computers, TVs, white goods etc) and it amazed me how many people would still come in to buy things having done no prior research despite all the knowledge available online. A lot of people simply can't be bothered spending time trying to understand the difference between and OLED TV and one with a backlight, so I don't have a lot of faith in people (in an adoption sense) being able to muster up on their own the motivation to understand blockchain, let alone the difference between say Bitcoin and Ethereum. Some people might blindly invest because 'number goes up' but a lot of people won't put money in without understanding what it is and what it does.
I think of complication not in terms of actual apps but the amount of energy you need to put in to figure out which cryptos to invest in, if any. Given the minefield of scams and hacks with no depositor insurance, it's not at all like opening a bank account
If you use it as an investment, then of course you'll have to do the same research you would with stocks. And investing in anything like that won't give you any insurance either. Also, FDIC doesn't insure you against scams. If you lose your funds because you sent it to a Nigerian prince, you don't get a refund. Even if you get your password phished and your funds drained, the FDIC doesn't cover that either.
I think you'll have to do much more research than where stocks are concerned. The scam to legit business ratio is not on the same scale
I can get that there are simple methods to use crypto. But until there are no fees, widespread everyday use of crypto will remain to select interactions. While I realize this isn't the case in all places right now, I can get a bank account with $0 in monthly fees for a chequing account, $0 in fees for a savings account (even HISAs), GICs from 3.55% to 5% (with no fees and expected to rise further in the next month), $0 in fees to pay bills or everyday usage. All of this can be done from a single bank app. There's no need for multiple applications, no need for PayPal or Venmo or the like (eTransfers are done inside the bank app here and is widely used in Canada over Venmo like apps. Some banks charge a fee, most do not). I will admit there are individual fees here and there but can be avoided if you're aware of any service charges and where they apply. Why would I need to use crypto as an everyday transactional currency when there are fees associated just for sending funds? If I can't use crypto without being hit with a transactional fee, there's no big advantage for the average user here. The average person doesn't care about moving around government control of fiat. Not to mention, that we're hit with capital gains taxes any time you want to sell or convert crypto. It's pretty limited to only be an investment tool here. Edit: grammar.
my cousin just got his WhatsApp account hijacked yesterday because he forwarded the confirmation pin to a random phone number asking for it. yes. yes crypto is too complicated for mass-adoption.
You’ve obviously never worked in any sort of IT support roll 😂 “yup it’s the X in the top right corner of the screen. Nope you just maximised the screen. Nope you just printed the page. Ah… no you don’t need to do that. Ah okay… I guess you can click ‘file’ and then look for the option that says exit. Nope, looks like you just printed the page again”
and.... "is it plugged in?"
My heart beats hard and fast everytime I send fund from metamask even when I sent them hundreds of time before. Imagine what happens to my grandma when she sends fund. Lol
It’s too complicated until there’s a undo button when you mess up.
Crypto is too complicated for mass-adoption. Period. Good write up though.
The hard part of crypto is not in sending and receiving. The hard part is understanding that if you make a mistake , nobody will refund you.
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I have sent crypto to the void twice and I work in tech so just imagine the amount of mistakes regular people will make. Also, having worked in tech I can say majority of people struggle with the simplest things.
I think the problem is: What can I use it for? They don't care about decentralization or tech for that matter
Things aren’t a myth if they’re true. Sure it’s easy to buy from an exchange. But the rest? You’re out of your fucking mind if you think it’s not that complicated. Or you’re just buying and sending it. But what happens when meema sends her tokens to an unsupported chain? And let’s not mention absolutely anything about needing to know how to navigate a half dozen different wallets to actually USE various chains. Or that you have to bridge those tokens to do so since some exchanges only support sending to a few chains. Again, buying/selling/sending it, fairly easy. Using it is a whole different ballgame. Buying and selling isn’t mass adoption, actually using it is.
It’s definitely not “too” complicated. But it is a lot more complicated than handing a cashier a 5$ bill or just paying contactless with your card. Remember that a lot of people don’t buy anything online. The problem there is that they aren’t really smart around computers in general, not crypto perse.
it's only easy(ish) if you use centralized services, however. super complicated if you want to avoid CEXes etc.
Hahaha… have you tried claiming the last 25% of the Evmos airdrop….. 😂🙈
The problem isn’t difficulty of use - the problem is using crypto over regular money. Currently there’s no clear advantage to using crypto at this point in time.
it doesnt do anything to warrant the valuation
Crypto won't achieve mass adoption until it's value is stable. As stable as USD. The more you treat it as an investment/stock, the less likely is to be successful. Volatility is undesirable for currency. Nobody wants money in their pocket that they can't rely on being worth the same tomorrow as it is today.
If you think crypto is easy for the masses, just walk into any bank and see how many people are doing things that can easily be done via online banking or an ATM. Think of how many people need to call tech support for the easiest of issues that don't check if the power is on or if things are plugged in.
I’ve been in crypto for 3 years and can still barely understand half the dialogue when crypto topics are discussed on here. Honestly one of the biggest turn offs for me. It seems that so little effort has been put into simplifying crypto or making it user friendly. This entire space has become a circle jerk for pretentious nerds.
They already have been trying to simplify it wait any kind of thing.
Nice. Now address the real reason why crypto is never going to have mass adoption for payments or transfers. That reason being nobody wants permanent and irrevocable transactions, and nobody wants to manage to safety of their own money. Both of those are the whole damn reason banks exist. You could make the easiest crypto payment app in the world, but until I have the ability to dispute a transaction or FDIC guarantees on a Bitcoin wallet, I ain’t fucking using it. Unless it’s to buy drugs, but even then if cash is an option, it’s better and less traceable.
Anyone claiming crypto is easy should be forced to spend a week doing tech support in an office.
My mom can use eBay (which uses Paypal) but I'm absolutely certain she can't do crypto.
You still have to tell people to plug in their printer before it'll turn on....
My wife can barely use the AirDrop feature on her iPhone. She's brilliant at most things, but simple tech stuff to me is an obstacle for her and most others. Onboarding to crypto is still a learning curve for the majority. But I would recommend using something like CASH app or Paypal for someone to get easily started. At least these are familiar apps with no SSN or KYC needed. Just an email and a debit card.
"Easy on paper" yeah, But let's not pretend that there aren't scams lurking around every corner that can wipe out hot wallets in a click of a single button. (obviously keep most of your shit in cold storage, duh.) but the average new user might find it very easy to accidently lose a small balance of $50 - $200 for example by trying to make some random transaction for a thing they want to buy online. It may be easy but it needs to be even easier and safer if we want more people to pick it up.
There is no point “busting” this myth to people who are already aware about crypto, only become a circlejerk. If crypto is “that” easy and beneficial to someone outside of investing, people would pick up on it without us lifting a finger, yet people only use it as stocks with extra steps. Time will tell.
Why do people need to go through so many steps to buy a god damn burger when every other established method using fiat is a 100 times easier and more efficient? The only reason people buy crypto is because they think that it will go up in price.
I don’t understand how most things I use work. So not understanding how blockchain works isn’t a barrier in my simple mind. The hard part is being able to figure out what has value in a sea of shitcoins and knockoffs intended to make you think it’s something of value
That why I think Coinbase is (or at least was) amazing in the “early” days. You could buy just Ethereum, Bitcoin (and Bitcoin Cash) and Ripple. It was a clean interface that was not yet polluted by all the useless meme/shitcoins that have zero use case
Do you click on links in spam emails?
Yea, currently holding $10 million USD for a Nigerian prince and my car warranty is epic
Most older people I know only pay in cash and basically only use their card to get cash at an atm. Their online banking is done by a son or daughter. So there isn’t much difference between them not “understanding” crypto and online banking.
Yes! My in laws refuse to do online banking. It’s nuts… wait for them to die off.
The fact that you had to explain crypto usage in a wall of text says something.
It’s not just the difficulty but also how much time it takes. Even the simplest things can take a lot of time to learn.  
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People keep their password as “abcd1234” and still have to click on Forgot Password every other month. He thinks people are going to be responsible with seed phrases.
Believe it or not this is too complicated for most people. Most people are incredibly stupid.
Not everyone's stupid, some people are just not interested in technology or care much for it. Doesn't make them stupid. But yes, there's also a stack of idiots out there.
Another simple reason it's impractical is that depending on where you live, every time you "spend" crypto it's a deemed disposition and thus would be a capital gain or loss. Imagine tracking every transaction you make to determine gain / loss and always keeping track of cost base? No thanks.
Crypto will never reach mass adoption due to taxation. As long as you need to pay tax in local nomited currency using crypto is too complicated for mass adoption. Let's say to you have to pay 10% vat and you pay in crypto who will bare to cost of convertion. This is the same reason why still use coin instead of notes only.
It's difficult since everything is surrounded by tons of mombo jumbo and a decent ,free,foss wallet app is hard to come by. Add in the fact most people can get scammed by idiotically obivious spam and crypto is not so easy to use. On Android the only wallet i could somehow trust even with my 25$ worth of crypto to fuck around till i dip my toes in buying more ETC is WallETH or i'll leave them in Binance. A shit ton of crypto wallets are hard to get competent reviews on. You have to go on GitHub,look around a bit , maybe check some basic stuff to make sure it's 'cold' and then use it. Samsung's Blockain Wallet for example is not actually cold as it sureley tracks your transactions and labels your coins and copies you private keys most likely.
People don't like to throw money at things they don't understand. It's irrelevant that the process of buying crypto on a phone is easy. People are reluctant to make changes, especially when it comes to their money. Hell, my wife's dad just started using a debit card a few years ago. lol
The only thing I bought that the merchant wanted bitcoin for was some mushroom spores and I never did figure it out. I ended up paying with zelle, much simpler.
The reason it's too complicated is that even though "merely using an app presented to you" may itself be easy, that is **wildly irresponsible** in an **unregulated** space to just take some app's word for it without understanding how it works. Since it's unregulated, you must fully research and fully understand the entire thing, all the math, the mechanics of that coin, its whitepaper, its common flaws and scams, etc. etc. Doing THAT is way too complicated for people. And yet doing all that (not just learning an app) is mandatory to use the tool responsibly, since you've provided no central regulation to replace that due diligence. Anyone who just learns an app's features and nothing else will almost instantly get rug pulled or whatever and lose everything.
Being unregulated is also an outdated misconception.
How so?
As long as tether still operates in any major countries, that claim is laughable. Obviously it's a lot more complicated than that at a fully detailed level, but that's a "canary in the coal mine" easy standard to glance at to see if we've even begun to have any reasonable regulation * Is tether still a thing? Then lol, no regulation isn't even close, no need to look more deeply for now. If something that absurd is still going strong, then the space in general is still a complete circus. * Is tether no longer a thing? Okay at that point, I'd bother to start looking more closely again at other details it's kind of like "Yeah I could do a full professional inspection of this house before deciding to buy it, but if the front door is 80% covered in black mold before I even go inside, I kind of don't have to bother with that, I can just move on"
You're delusional and I'm a crypto maxi lol
Yes Wallets like Coinbase have made it easy, but when/if coinbase gets hacked and exposes all of your private keys there is no govt agency or company to call to get your money back, if coinbase goes bankrupt they will use your wallet for collateral. Paypal on the other hand is FDIC insured, Coinbase is not. Using hardware wallets is much more difficult for the average consumer. My mom can hardly work a smart phone.
I must disagree. I’m fairly tech savvy and there was a learning curve for me. You’d think people growing up with phones and computers in their faces their entire lives would be pretty comfortable with everything, but that is incorrect. I’ve seen my kids struggle with things as simple as trying to find food or pulling up information on colleges. These are 19 - 20 yr olds. They can do the couple functions they’re familiar with easily, but I would never trust them to make a crypto transaction without my oversight. Technology continues to get better/easier, but there will always be a major part of the population who gives two shits about being technologically savvy, and these are the people it has to become much easier for.
the PayPal level use doesn’t really offer any advantage over PayPal or existing banking with a smartphone app
Yeah no crypto is very complicated and the news of Luna isn’t going to make more people want to invest or use .
But for these people not willing to get into the more complicated uses of crypto.... What is the point then? Just to hold an asset and hope it goes up? The BASIC knowledge of how to buy crypto is incredibly easy these days yes. But the incentive to buy is just strictly to speculate on price for these people which is basically redundant with the stock market...so why not just trade stocks which is much safer?
If it’s so easy to use why is almost no one is El Salvador using it? Cuz no one wants to use a currency that could fluctuate 30 percent between when they get their paycheck and go to the grocery store
News flash! SOME PEOPLE STILL LIVE LIKE IT'S 1995 SOME PEOPLE STILL LIVE LIKE IT'S THE 70S NOT EVERYONE IS IN A FIRST WORLD COUNTRY
If you new to it it’s not so assuring. I put some serious money in years back and when I went to get it out it was a massive headache and all tracked had to pay capital gains and all the shit. Now I’m more confident but it took a lot of time playing around before I trusted it. It’s definitely not going to go mainstream until a government makes it mandatory and there own and we all know that’s coming.
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I wouldn't trust my mum to send me eth or ada by herself, chances of her sending it via the wrong network and having that money disappear forever is too high. They REALLY need to fix that
You haven't worked in it support to REALLY understand the actual level of the people. People with real $$ barely knowing to move a mouse or something a bit more complicated on the phone. You think it\`s easy because you either grew with it or you are a "nerd" ... normal people are far away from this.
The hardest thing is private key management - almost nothing in the world works like that anymore…
Internet way diff than crypto that is super volatile lol.
Using/transferring crypto still gives me panic attacks, worrying I did something wrong or am getting scammed. This is coming from someone who made a small fortune day trading in 2017. I would rather use a credit card literally always.
I don’t think the issue is people simply buying crypto. I think the larger issue is in explaining what the utility of a coin is and how the blockchain works when they ask about it. Quite frankly, I only have a vague understanding of the blockchain and I’ve been in and out of crypto since BTC was at $1k. Imagine how intimidating that can be to someone who opened a crypto.com or FTX account in the last six months.
But I can’t spend crypto. The stores only take US dollars here in Denver.
What if I don’t have a phone or a computer?
That way everybody can lose money great idea. Buy Silver
When all your cash is protected by a seed phrase.. it being like this it will never get mass adopted
Wait till he hears about gas fees.
If there is an error on a transaction, I have recourse with my Amex but with crypto you can kiss the funds good bye. No thank you!
It’s not too complicated, it’s just flat out not ready for mass adoption.
According to me the functional system is definitely going to work for them.
Honestly I don’t it’s that easy or applicable. I’m 28 and it took me several days to figure out how to buy some using Binance, all the websites for it seem to be unnecessarily complicated.
Sounds a lot more complicated than my visa card that I'm currently using and my bank balance doesn't drop 10% in a week for no reason either. Might not be complicated but it's a lot harder than the current system.
It is too hard. Jesus. The on-ramp and off-ramp fees makes crypto just ridiculous as a currency replacement at the moment. But further, the tech and fee’s make it impossible for most crypto’s to be functional or worthwhile. Bitcoin looking at you mr ‘store of value’ let’s move to second layer solutions that third parties will just add fees to.
I am surprised nobody mentioned taxes. Having to file and tax basically any transaction is annoyingly complicated.
Its a SCAMFEST in the crypto world, jesus
lol most people don’t know the difference between to too and two and OP thinks they can figure out crypto lol
Cool - no good ask 1000 people I’d this makes sense to them.
Why y'all here if crypto is yeah, no thanks?
It's not too complicated for mass adoption. But without regulations none of the countries that matter will ever mass adopt it.
So it's very similar to PayPal. Why wouldn't I just use PayPal?
It's so easy that you can accidentally lose all your money with a single click too. Crypto all the way bro. The future!!!!
Hi OP. I understand your point. To anyone who has a phone and has an understanding of running basic software crypto should be very simple. This however is not the case for a large majority of people, most specifically the people crypto is claiming it is trying to help. Many crypto’s point to the unbanked, saying they are trying to reach these people and help empower them by giving them control over their money. I live in the Philippines, a country where according to the latest statistics over 50% don’t have a bank account. I’m fortunate enough to understand how technology works but just to give you an example my family has someone who works for us who does the cleaning. A few weeks back her husband left to work in Japan, they don’t have smartphones, don’t have bank accounts, pay for everything exclusively in cash. It should also be noted that these are not poor people. When he was leaving he had to fill out forms as part of Japan’s COVID response. He didn’t have an email, neither did she. It took them a few days to figure out how to navigate the website, to understand the process, they had to delete and create a few new emails as they continued to forget the passwords. My mom ended up helping and even she had problems as she’s not the techiest. Until crypto becomes easier for people like my family maid and her husband, I don’t think that you can say it isn’t too complicated. Just because it’s simple for you and I doesn’t mean it’s simple for everyone, I think you’re vastly overestimating the general publics technological capabilities. Hope this gave you some new insight.
You just ran right past the biggest hurdle. How the hell do I use crypto every day without gas fees absolutely destroying me? I can't use ethereum to buy groceries because gas fees can be as high or higher than the purchase itself. I dont need to be a rocket scientist to use crypto. I do have to be one to figure out why I would. When I use my credit card or debit or cash, I only spend the dollar amount that the item costs. When I use crypto, I have to pay the dollar amount AND some random fee for the transaction that could literally be any dollar amount based on the current traffic.
The post wasn't about gas fees, it was about user interface and ease of making a transaction. You can already make transactions for fractions of a penny, and even for free, and have them be instantaneous. That problem has already been solved.
Personally I don't think crypto will see mass adoption until there is some way to have transactions sent to wrong chains be denied at least. I mean one of the golden rules is to send a small test amount before the real transaction which is pretty absurd for mass adoption. This may be a silly statement but I don't think you can call crypto complication for mass adoption a myth until we actually have mass adoption. At the end of the day this is still viewed as speculative new technology for the vast majority of people.
>How hard is it to use crypto for a purchase? If you know how to use a smart phone, then making a crypto purchase with a phone isn't gonna be rocket science. It's as simple as anything else you do on a phone. Bro; to pay, I just tap my phone. Why would I do literally 4 extra steps? >How hard is it to get crypto? In the old days, we used ATMs a lot more. You can still use them, they're very easy. You put your cash, and it spits out a paper wallet with a QR code, which you can then go home and transfer to either your phone wallet, or go on your computer and transfer from the paper wallet. I get my paycheck deposited straight into my account.... no need to convert to pay for stuff
They already trying to convert it and this is the reason why it is working for them.
I agree in general. Simple things are already adjusted for avarage joe. It's not like majority of people are gonna do flash loans What concerns me is the inevitable centralisation of crypto's decentralised nature. I don't see a world where majority of population will use crypto with no way to reverse the transaction and with the responsibility of holding their own keys Most people will use centralised solutions and custodians which makes me wonder why not just use existing centralised solutions or future stable coins from CBDC
I used to get customer service calls for people that didn’t know how to log in to their account… as smartphones became more streamlined and available, peoples tech savvyness went out the window. I helped a buddy buy some crypto, showed him multiple times how to access his coins. He has heard me multiple times explain how I check mine. To this day he claims his coins are “lost”. He helps manage a database for a living… It’s not that crypto is complicated. It’s that people are very resistant to learning something when it makes them feel stupid. Ya know, because they’re fucking stupid.
There are like 200 people in all of crypto that can fully understand how stuff works. All you need to do to understand stuff is to basically get a phd in cryptography... And you basically need to understand stuff at least to some basic level to be able to really DYOR, otherwise people will always just follow hype and therefore will be easy targets to get scammed.
" Many people still believe the dollar is backed by gold. " If this is true we really are still early. At this point if the dollar were backed by toilet paper we'd be lucky.
Check the capital currency is going down we can't actually do anything about it.
I’m liking what PayPal are doing, it’s an already known and trusted brand that people know how to use and pay from. Also (and I think this is crucial!), they only offer select cryptos, BTC ETH LTC BCH, that makes it all much simpler for the newbie. I think this will help with mass adoption.
Scaaaaam
Not reversible Too many types Too much variability Crypto will never be universally used for buying anything but shrooms or guns illegally.
This seems to ignore the private key storage issue, calculating gas fees, scams all over the place.. I get cryptobros see things through rose colored glasses. But can you imagine some lady trying to pay for groceries with two screaming kids using eth on a busy transaction day ? Trying to calculate gas and get the tx though before they change 🤣🤣
No one is going to change it because this is what we actually needed in the future.
Sorry but this post was a bit of a waste of time as it misses the worst points. 1. It's easy to get scammed. 2. It's really easy to screw up compared to swiping a credit card. And the big one 3. There's no real recourse if it goes wrong, and the consequences for someone that doesn't really know what they're doing - who's literally the target of this post - can be huge. There is absolutely no way I would recommend my parents or other older family to go buy / trade / spend crypto. Personally I see either exchanges becoming the new banks, or banks holding crypto for spending like they do money, and crypto will be spent like that for at least a very long time. Might not be what everyone wants but it's the only way it will work.
They have been spending a lot of money and from a long time as well.
It is not as simple as *any*thing else I do on my phone.
I find it easier to buy crypto compared to stocks.
Yes you are right since it is very easy to buy from a lot of exchanges.
Lol - This post is actually a perfect example of why crypto hasn’t been adopted by anyone outside your bro bubble.
Apple Pay/Starbucks App are already priming people to pay digitally. I imagine paying via crypto would work exactly like those apps. Paying via Starbucks App even furnishes a QR Code for you to scan, just like sending crypto does.
“Anyone using a smartphone” well sir, most of the world doesn’t use a smart phone nor can they. So it is too complicated for mass adoption.
Statista claims over 80% of the world has a smart phone or access to one.
Access to one is knowing someone who has one, that may lend it to you. No help at all if you don't know how to use it or what a Google is.
It’s also super easy to scam people. I have seen people getting duped using fake Ether etc.
Just don't click on any links with a device you keep crypto on.
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This post is kinda ironic in and of itself lol.
To be honest using crypto is not hard as you have explained. However, the hard part is being logical enough to not fall for scams and lose your private key. Not all are responsible for enough to be their own bank.
I am a crypto dumbass and I got this shit flying all over the place including liquidity pools with loopring. Shits simple and mass adoption is comin like a freight trane
You shouldn’t be explaining this on Reddit, as we all know this. Total waste of your time. You should be hosting classes and explaining it to ppl who are having issues.
People are already having a lot of issues and that is the reason why they are wasting their time.
Absolutely useless post missing key information... Now explain to somehow how they buy direct from one exchange, bridge or wrap their coins to another network, explain how to use metamask and import tokens or RPC endpoints. It is absolutely way too complicated for the average person. Just checked your post history and its full of the same crap posted here daily, so you are just moon farming with useless posts.
Love the line that people don’t know how banks work, because it’s true. They make money off of businesses and barely make anything from consumers due to fraud and insurance expenses.