this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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Is it actually viable for ordinary people to purchase small amounts of cryptocurrency for the sole purposes of making more private purchases online or taking advantage of cryptocurrency discounts? All the coverage on them is about large-scale investing which makes me feel like no one buying and selling actually has any interest in cryptocurrencies as an alternative currency. Instead it's just about getting rich, which is a massive turn off.
Bitcoin is not practical for small purshases, because transaction takes several minutes, and have around 50USD per-transaction fee. Note the cost of fees and value of bitcoin vary wildly, so the same amount of bitcoin may be enough to pay rent in August, but not in September.
On a more ethical level, it's also quite bad because of the insane energy cost of bitcoin transactions.
$50 per transaction fee is on the exceptionally high end.
The average fee for the last 24 hours was $0.81 per transaction according to https://mempool.space/mining
I agree with your other points.