Technology

I'm sure the ancient Greeks said similar things about their steam pinwheels.

By "convenient" I meant in comparison with getting a foreign card for me, which involves bureaucracy and (by my measure) incredibly expensive travel. As for "picking a coin" - that is not really an issue, since swaps between currencies can be done instantly and very easily. And there are only a few major coins that are commonly accepted anyway (BTC, LTC, XMR and maybe ETH).

For people needing anonymity, giving up consumer protection may be an acceptable tradeoff. Same as with cash.

Pre-paid cards make sense because said cards may be unavailable where the customer resides, and either they can't (like me) or don't want to use a KYC method to buy them.

As for difficulty for the merchant - yeah, I agree it is a significant downside.

P.S. Fees are indeed a problem in Bitcoin at least, but Monero's are barely noticeable.

There are only really two cryptocurrencies you should care about:

• Bitcoin - figure out how the Lighting network works
• Monero

That's it. Which wallet you use is up to you, and there are plenty of easy ones freely available for phones (e.g. I use Monerujo on Android).

Bitcoin is the most widely used coin, and Monero is the most privacy-friendly. You can exchange between them using something like Kraken (perhaps the best place to buy/exchange crypto). Bitcoin transactions are slow (processed every 4 hours, I think?), expensive (like multiple dollars), and publicly traceable (if you have the wallet id, you can see everyone you've transacted with and how much), which is where Lightning comes in, which dramatically reduces transaction time, reduces fees, and improves privacy. Monero is private by default, and the way it handles transactions discourages mining farms, so there's usually a bit less speculation and generally way lower fees (usually <$0.01).

As for why you'd do it, it's because you value your privacy or you do a lot of international transactions (cryptocurrencies don't care what country the two parties are in). If you buy a pre-paid card w/ credit or debit, the banks can track that transaction and potentially figure out what you used the pre-paid card for, and if they work w/ the government, it's trivial to track that down (e.g. if you live in or visit a place like China). With Monero, they can only track interactions w/ fiat (i.e. buying or selling at an exchange), they can't tell where you used those funds or anything of that sort. And that's true even if they collude with the buyer or seller, they can't track Monero wallet details to an individual on either end of the transaction.

Some stores offer a discount for buying w/ Monero (and potentially other coins), such as the YouTuber "Mental Outlaw," who hosts based.win and offers a 10% discount for buying in Monero.

That said, there aren't a ton of place that accept cryptocurrency, which is a bummer. But the more people start to use it for even small things, the more likely stores are to accept it. That's my dog in this race, I want to use Monero where it's available so the few stores that accept it continue to, and hopefully they'll find enough value in it to get other stores on board. I don't hate fiat or anything, I just hate how much tracking there is with other digital payment systems.