Quote from: Smack That Ace on Today at 03:23:20 PM

My question is that even if bitcoin's transaction fees are resolved but given its volatility, is it suitable to be a currency? Is there any currency that will increase or decrease 10% or 20% in value in a day, even an hour? That would cause a lot of problems for people using it for payments.
In my opinion, a volatile asset is more suitable for investment than being a currency, and moreover, how many people are willing to use it as currency? What I see is that people were only focused on the returns that bitcoin provided before we had ETFs. Therefore, I think it is not the ETF's fault that bitcoin cannot become a currency, but it is we who turn bitcoin into an investment, a commodity.

You could potentially use a volatile currency if you only held small amounts of it at a time.

Some people who live in countries where currency there is very volatile (although not anywhere near as volatile as Bitcoin) will keep their wealth in an offshore account, and transfer only the money they need in their sovereign currency that day or even minutes before a purchase. And if you have a credit card that draws from an investment account, your wealth can be stored in whatever instrument and everything will be handled for you behind the scenes vis a vie the exchange rates.

And with credit cards and the Internet, one can imagine a the "UI" for your money always being displayed in some measure of wealth you can understand, e.g. US dollars for instance (and yes, this is exactly what we're doing at Haypenny with the "USDE" mechanism).

Most people aren't able to abstract a difference between their payment mechanism, their wealth store, and their measurement mechanism ("how much does it really cost me"), but this is exactly what you need to do in order to understand today's globalized world of finance.

And in this world, Bitcoin and cryptos are speculation instruments, not payment mechanisms. Currency that can viably be used for payment e.g. US dollars or (eventually) Haypenny currencies are all both investments and payment mechanisms. In other words, if you hold Euros, you are essentially investing in Euros, and you can also broadly make payments in directly Euros, etc.

So in summary, there are three different things an instrument can give you:

1. A means of speculation, e.g. an investment you surmise will go up in value.

2. A means of transacting with others.

3. A means of understanding the value, in your own terms, of a given transactions (e.g. converting it to USD or whatever your "native" currency is that your own brain is used to).

Bitcoin and cryptos do #1 only, practically speaking.

Haypenny does #1 and #2 (and it's UI allows you to do #3 in USD specifically).

Traditional currencies do all three.