Crypto is also accepted as a means of exchange. There are plenty of merchants willing to accept it as payment, but they are just not geographically concentrated in one location like banknote-accepters are. With a banknote, you have a very high concentration of merchants who will accept that as a means of payment in one geographic area (i.e. the country or region whose central bank issued that banknote), while it is not accepted anywhere else. With most cryptocurrencies, they will be acceptable worldwide, but the concentration of people willing to take it in any given geographic area is low.

It is important to note that you can’t take properties of the smaller coins (the ones which you are probably thinking of are derisively referred to as “shitcoins” and most are deserving of that epithet) and apply them to every cryptocurrency. Just like you can’t use properties of the Zimbabwean dollar to smear all fiat currencies in general.

Bitcoin transactions on its Lightning Network are typically instantaneous, and fees are lower than most credit cards (usually on the order of 0.1%). An on-chain Bitcoin transaction currently has a fee of about 1 USD, which would make it competitive to credit cards for transactions greater than 40 USD. Bitcoin fees, despite being notorious for being the highest among all cryptos, are actually very competitive with most traditional payment methods. This transaction from the most recent block at the time of writing paid about 117 USD to move over 411 BTC worth 48.5 million USD. That means they paid about 0.00024% in fees and this is the highest-fee transaction in this block (meaning they paid the highest fee rate of any transaction in this block). The going rate for this block was actually much lower; whoever sent this transaction overpaid by about 50 times.

This is called debt monetisation and has been forbidden by law in the US since 1981.

In the US if someone takes your debit card and enters the correct PIN, the transactions are permanent, and the bank has no obligation to give your money back (and if they choose to do so it would be out of their own pocket).

“Debit” in the United States refers to chip-and-PIN transactions only (though tap-and-PIN is also now a thing). The US debit card networks process only in-person transactions because their fees are limited by law and the risk of fraud is lower for chip-and-PIN compared to the “trust me bro” of online card transactions.

All other transactions processed through the Visa or Mastercard network are treated as credit card transactions for the purposes of processing the transaction on the network, even if the underlying card is a debit card.

It’s true in the United States. In the US, a debit card transaction is an EFTPOS (electronic funds transfer at point of sale) and once you enter your PIN, there are no take-backs and if you want a refund and the merchant refuses, you have to resort to the legal system for recourse. Credit cards, on the other hand, have consumer protection rules and dispute procedures.

The merchant pays the fee. With cryptocurrencies, the consumer pays the fee. Some sites offer a discount for paying with cryptocurrency as a result. For example, most precious metals dealers who accept Bitcoin offer a 3% discount for using it.

I think we can. Have you not heard of this phrase before?

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Satoshi Nakamoto put it in the zeroth block of the Bitcoin blockchain.

This is really getting into the weeds of what you define “value” to be. You could equally argue that a banknote also has no practical real world use other than hoarding (and to trade to others).

1. You’re a criminal who wants to evade tracking by law enforcement
2. You live in a country subject to sanctions and need to move a large sum of money transnationally
3. You are the tinfoil-hat type who doesn’t trust Government-issued money for one of many real or imagined reasons
4. You want to make digital purchases while staying relatively anonymous
5. You’re a gambler who went all-in on crypto and are hoping it will increase in value later on
6. You just think it’s more fun to pay with futuristic magic Internet money (yes, some people actually do it for this reason)
7. You are a business in a (the) country whose laws legally require the acceptance of Bitcoin

This already exists. 1 bitcoin = 1,000 mBTC = 100,000,000 satoshi. The exchange rate as of writing is about 846 satoshis = 1 USD or 982 satoshis = 1 EUR. The current usage is thusly:

• Transaction fees on the main network are measured in sats/B (satoshis per [virtual] byte [of transaction size]).
• Transactions on the Lightning Network, a lower-fee instant payment network that runs on top of the ordinary Bitcoin network, are all denominated in respect to satoshis. So a payment on the Lightning Network is traditionally regarded as, for example, 50,000 satoshis rather than 0.5 mBTC or 0.0005 BTC. And the fee on that payment is usually in the range of 50-100 satoshis.
• Goods sold on the Lightning Network are typically priced in satoshis.

Most of the large ones only take bank transfers and cryptocurrency now.

I’ve got nothing against you. I’m just not willing to accept a lecture (from other people, not you) about being “lazy” for wanting tap-to-pay on my cell phone. My statement is that the convenience of tap-to-pay for payment cards and transit passes is not worth the otherwise marginal privacy benefit of switching to Graphene.

How’s this confusing? They’re a Puritanical group. They do Puritanical things. They want people to live a Puritanical life. Literally nothing deep about it.

I don’t wear a watch at all. I view smart watches in particular as completely useless gadgets. What useful thing do they do that a cell phone doesn’t? Count your heart rate? Sell that info to advertisers so they know what time you stay up at night doom-scrolling? They have absolutely no utility for me.

As it is right now, my cell phone replaces a collection of about six plastic cards. I have not yet found a wieldy phone case that has space to store payment cards.

Realistically, this question could also be asked with cash. If you’re going to be pulling out a wallet-like item anyway, and you are that concerned with privacy, why not go with anonymous, fee-free, secure, actually offline paper money? Card processing is not offline. The card machine has to be connected to the Internet for it to work (offline card processing theoretically exists, but is not widely implemented enough to rely on and is not particularly secure).

If people are going to argue that wanting to pay with a cell phone instead of a plastic card makes me lazy because the card takes a few extra seconds to use compare to the phone, I’m going to argue in turn that they’re lazy for using a card when using cash, with all of its privacy benefits, also only takes a few seconds more.

I’d love to stay private, but I’m so addicted to giving my financial information to banks that I can’t handle pulling out a lighter, fee-free, no-Internet-access-required, and nearly universally-accepted banknote from my wallet and so will continue to give up data about my spending so I can continue to be mildly inconvenienced.

I would love to get GrapheneOS or some other similar OS but the lack of mobile tap-to-pay support just kills the idea for me.

Government sources indicate that the US really only imports from two Middle Eastern countries: Iraq and Saudi Arabia. I don’t see how either of those countries would be particularly displeased if the US cuts off Israel.

Israel is a useless ally. They just hold their hands out for American money and don’t seem to provide anything in return other than bad press. Maybe you could make an argument that Israel’s position is beneficial for regional stability, but I don’t see why other countries couldn’t fill that role. There is no shortage of strongmen in the Middle East. Yeah, they’re the “oNlY deMocRaCy iN tHe MiddLe EasT” but that means nothing if their electorate always just votes for politicians who want to massacre their neighbours.

In the United States, the Constitution states that in order to take your land for this purpose, you must be compensated fairly. Of course, “fairly” in terms of market value did not amount to very much, but compensation was paid and even dilapidated housing in so-called “blighted” neighbourhoods were still worth something and the cost does add up when you’re knocking hundreds of houses down and having to pay thousands for each one.

Israel’s government issued a formal declaration of war against Hamas on 7th October 2023. But that doesn’t give it the right to attack Syria.

You don’t need to recognise the entity you are declaring war against as a state to do so. Cameroon declared war against Ambazonia (separatist group) on 4th December 2017.

Notably for this conflict, the First Syrian Republic declared war against Israel in 1948. While the two never agreed to a peace treaty, the First Syrian Republic no longer exists, nor its successor, nor its successor’s successor, Israel’s attack against Syria is—to put it very, very generously—of extremely dubious legality under international law. I don’t claim to be an expert in international law, but after the Assad regime was overthrown, I would consider the new Syrian Arab Republic as a legally different polity than its predecessor. I don’t recall hearing any confirmations from the new Syrian government that they want to continue war against Israel, so if that is all correct then Israel just attacked a neutral country that so happened to be populated by Arabs sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, which is honestly par for the course for the Israeli military.