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RE: The rocky road to SteemFest #4, part 2
I would've simply cashed out enough BTC to both cover the expenses and to pay capital gains taxes on the appreciation of your BTC during the time you held it. Sure, you can perhaps avoid some fees by paying directly with BTC but you're going to have to cash out some extra to pay your taxes so you might as well have converted all of it into fiat now. There is no telling how the price of BTC will behave between now and when this year's taxes will have to be paid (in August 2020). BTC did not rally immediately following the mining reward halving last time and I don't believe it will do it next time, either.
I have no idea why I would want to pay in fiat if I can use magic internet money instead. That's the whole idea in digital currencies, to be able to pay with them. If you take that away, they will lose their utility, and then it'll be game over for bitcoin and other cryptos.
Making payments and other transactions is one of the main utilities that cryptocurrencies are built for, and if that doesn't work, there wouldn't be much use in having them. Why not think about it from a practical point of view?
Bitcoin is particularly crappy as money. It's horrifically volatile and the user has to be mindful of things like transfer fees to be able to make the payment. Your very post is a reminder of the futility using Bitcoin for payments even when you use a centralized middleman like Bitpay as a go-between.
If it were possible to pay with a stablecoin it would be a totally different matter altogether. No business can have a large proportion of its payments made using most cryptocurrencies at this stage. It's an unworkable idea in most cases. First of all, there was to be a stabilization mechanism in place. When a business has thin margins, it simply cannot afford to take on the massive exchange rate risk associated with wildly fluctuating currencies.
I don't see the value proposition of Bitcoin to be mainly that of a means of payment. It can be used for that purpose but, currently, I see Bitcoin deriving most of its value from being a non-correlated financial asset that can be used as a hedge when a small percentage of one's portfolio is allocated to it.
A stablecoin backed by other crypto-assets that has a PoS consensus mechanism has a vastly better chance of being adopted as a means of payment by businesses.
You are making a case against all crypto currencies. Even if you wanted "a stable crypto", it would still mean you would have to exchange other non-stable cryptos to hold some to make payments with. Why not make it too complicated for anyone other than some hardcore crypto nerds, and just skip a step?
Things like this tend to boil my blood. I don't see any adoption if the payment utility is stripped away from cryptos just because "they are too volatile".
The one argument that is constantly made against investing in Bitcoin and other cryptos is, that they don't have any utility, that you can't use them "in the real world". That's the one argument we always need to prove wrong.
I don't think any PoW coin will pass muster with users. PoW exists for the purposes of security and maximal censorship resistance and permissionless (anyone can verify transactions). But with that comes with difficulty in scaling.
You're looking at it a bit too narrowly. In utility coins such as STEEM, the volatility is much, much less of a problem. STEEM powered up is a like a stock rather than a currency. Judging cryptos solely on the basis as their utility as payment systems is like equating the internet with email.
Coinswitch has dropped Steem entirely. There seem to be fewer and fewer places where Steem can be exchanged to anything really.
I've seen new service providers accept STEEM in the last year or so. It's difficult to say whether the acceptance of Steem has developed on balance.
Anyway, Steem a platform technologically superior to Bitcoin to be used for payments. You could actually pay for your coffee in STEEM.
Superiority doesn't really mean anything, until someone really pays their groceries, flights and hotel accomodations with Steem. Same goes for Bitcoin.
Until that happens, if ever, Steem will likely stay niche.
The success of Steem does not crucially depend on the acceptance of STEEM as a payment system in the wider world because STEEM (and all the tokens) is/are the currency of the attention economy on Steem. The platform aims to build a user base sorted by interest and capable of being targeted by advertisers with precision. That is the business case of the and the value proposition of the tokens here. It would help, of course, is businesses realized the utility of having a Steem account and the ability to accept SBD and STEEM as payment for goods and services. But STEEM is much more than a mere ledger of payments. It's a utility token for the attention economy on Steem.