Quote from: poornamelessme on November 17, 2019, 09:15:23 PM

Quote from: wxa7115 on November 17, 2019, 08:27:31 PM

Quote from: apoorvlathey on October 13, 2019, 11:45:28 PM

You all might be knowing that Steam used to accept payments in bitcoin through BitPay, but they abruptly stopped it stating the price volatility of bitcoin to be the issue.
Stablecoins eliminates this very issue, could this encourage Steam or other companies like Amazon,etc. to start incorporating cryptocurrencies into their payment systems.
Is it possible some stablecoin might outperform bitcoin regarding this?

But that is not really the reason why we have stable coins, bitcoin was actually created with the intention of being a currency used to pay for all kind of products, it is just that the adoption level has not reached the level where we can use it to buy everything that we want, stable coins were created with a very different objective in mind, they were created to allow investors to protect themselves from the volatility of this market.

That is it, they perform their function really well and it allows you to get a coin that behaves like fiat without having to deposit that money in a bank account, but stable coins will never be used massively as no one is using them to buy anything.

The problem is although bitcoin was created with the intention of being a currency, it really hasn't worked out that way so far. And the issue isn't just adoption, or speed of transactions, or fees (which are still pretty big hurdles). It's volatility.

Do you really think an everyday person not involved in crypto (or even those most who are), will use btc in the same way they use fiat? Ever?

Unless BTC hits a certain level and stays there for years, with huge money backing it to prop up the price, I don't see it ever occurring. Nobody wants to buy a TV at 1K then find out 2 months later that same amount of btc is now worth 5K... or a year later is 20K.

As for stablecoins, I agree that they weren't designed to be used as an everyday currency for purchasing goods. However, in theory, they would be very well suited for that task IF the SEC allows it, fees are less than what credit cards charge companies and transaction speed is at least in the same ballpark as credit cards. Lots of IFs, but it's one of the real ways crypto could hit mainstream. We could argue however that at that point, such a coin may not even be considered a real cryptocurrency, or at least not a decentralized one, as I expect it'd have to be centralized somewhere to maintain its price.

While your points are correct it is inevitable for bitcoin to be this volatile, the supply of bitcoin is very limited not only because of the 21 million limit that satoshi imposed but also because they are huge whales that are holding millions of bitcoins and they are not moving them or doing anything with them at all, so the main factor when it comes to determine the price of bitcoin is the demand.

And so far the demand is mostly been driven by speculation, but there is also another factor, bitcoin is being used only by a few million people and if there is a strong increase in that number then the price is bound to move erratically.