Monero is an online currency, not an IRL one

@SpinningCat updated

@eravsar If your argument is so compelling, why don't businesses accept it then?

Many people like to talk about the 2-3% credit card fees that can be avoided with Monero but these really don't translate in reality. The market moves that much often in a day. It can even move that much just during 10 confirmations.

Maybe it'd be possible to receive Monero, send to a CEX, exchange on their trading platform and withdrawal to fiat for like 1% in fees but the exact workflow to get the savings isn't clear unless maybe it was directly converted to a stablecoin via some type of pay method?

@H1XMR If cash is banned, sure. But the reality is that cash will always be more private. Even some people who work on the Monero project, if you watch to see them buy a drink at a conference, they pay in cash despite Monero being accepted. The reality is all digital forms of payment leave a trace, Monero may leave less of a trace but it's still one nonetheless.

Now we can argue that all the security cameras make it harder to say paying with cash is as private as it was, but it's still more private.

@xenu It is difficult to explain, imagine someone very old or young working as a cashier needing to be trained on blockchain confirmations across various crypto currencies, it's just not practical.

Long before Monerica, there were efforts to onboard merchants in SF and working with early PoS devices. It just didn't work out. Sure, there were a few coffee shops that had terminals accepting BTC but it was always stressful. This post is not about new territory, it's mostly just to say that the vast majority of people haven't actually tried to do the onboarding IRL businesses to see the pain points first hand.

Moreover, this is to say that there are many use cases for Monero that work today without forcing it into places with high friction. But to this end, every company could accept Monero buy just forcing the customer to buy a gift card for the value ahead of time. Those businesses could keep the XMR or not, but it would reduce the checkout friction.

@GlitchFrame This isn't about first hand experience running an IRL store. But there is past experience trying to onboard merchants in SF with crypto PoS devices. Very small shops are receptive because any new customers are good but larger merchants are not going to do this because like you say, they need certainty. And this is also talking about the USA, so maybe other countries have different needs or risk tolerance.

@Nebuchadnezzar_II There may be some situations where IRL could make sense. If you want to sell a car and then say to send to a Kraken address and immediately convert to fiat. Meet a person at a literal bank or police office or something for your own safety.

But these large transactions are also a target for regulators. There is a whole presentation at the last MoneroKon about this topic. You want to sell a helicopter on XmrBazaar or a huge plot of land? It's a huge target for regulators for obvious tax reasons.

@monerica
That doesn't make sense to me; if a car dealer wanted to convert to fiat immediately, then they would be better off insisting on cash, but if they wanted to avoid the fiat system then they would be better off discounting monero.

I see your point for large transactions; it makes sense for large purchases to be visible targets for law enforcement. I'm sure the same limitation applies to paper cash.

Consider businesses that meet two requirements:

1. No UX requirements that disqualify xmr.
2. Has historically preferred cash.

Such businesses, if they want to stay away from the fiat system, might well be better off incentivizing monero use. I certainly think this is true of tradesmen, medium sized purchases (cars, bikes, sofas), (gym) memberships, drugs, tickets (for shows).

Sure there are security risks and its not so adopted yet but I think in future lots of people will avoid the fiat system altogether and such people are likely to find each other more often than not and standard opsec procedures will emerge. For example, I am almost certainly going to train at the gym which happens to accept xmr, even though I chose it for completely unrelated reasons. I'm sure you and everyone else here knows exactly what I mean!

@Nebuchadnezzar_II The fiat system is not going anywhere. Maybe people will slowly work around it. But to this point, do they use XMR at all in China despite having a CBDC? It doesn't seem like they are using alternatives.