DD Support Board and Research Team

[dukeb]

There are several reasons why you might want to use cryptocurrency to make a payment. Anonymity is one (although the FBI demonstrated that BitCoin is not as untraceable as many believed). Transaction costs is another, particularly if you are sending funds overseas. While there are some transaction costs with BitCoin (exchanged post a buy price and a sell price), those costs are likely to be lower than the costs that banks charge for sending money via SWIFT - and there are no currency exchange fees with crypto. I sometimes purchase software not knowing that the vendor is in a foreign country and my bank hits me with a foreign transaction fee. There are cards that don't have such fees, but I'm too lazy to get another card.

In case case you can avoid the fluctuation in crypto by immediately converting back into your local currency.

I totally forgot that I had a fraction of a BTC sitting in an online wallet. When I logged into the wallet some years later and saw the value of my fraction I was pleasantly surprised.

Many people don't trust online wallets and so they download their coins to a hard drive or a flash drive. There are plenty of stories of people who threw a flash drive away forgetting that it held coins. And some folks have lost millions in crypto when the hard drive that held the coins died.

What has puzzled me from the outset is why anyone would want to use a currency whose value may change considerably from day to day.