Expensive and slow, for both buyer and retailer. It’s adding a step that’s not necessary if you can accept crypto directly.
If you’re a retailer that allows people to monetize their gains directly instead of selling off first, you open yourself up to a huge community.
Its hugely popular in the big ticket luxury goods, from jewelry and designer clothes to Ferraris, yachts, and real estate.
If you have a $1 million real estate transaction that can be settled instantly via crypto (plus a day for settlement via wire or ACH), it reduces counterparty risk on both sides, and cuts out banking transaction fees and KYC for one of the stops at a bank. Every time you move lots of money, financial services companies take a piece.
The modern banking system is essentially decades, maybe centuries behind other technologies. We move money very similar to how it was moved prior to WW2, just with shinier networks. But the nostro/vostro reserve banking system is essentially the same. One of the biggest sources of FUD against bitcoin is the banking industry. 90% of them would probably be out of work in a blockchain world.
Critics of bitcoin are essentially Internet critics from the mid-90s, “What would it be used for? Yeah sure. Who’s going to trust their banking to the Internet!? Using the Internet for stocks and investing? Haha, no way. We have trading floors for that!”
Its huge outside the US. While lots of people in the US hold crypto, we’re very much behind the ROW when it comes to using it for transactions.
“The purchaser just transition their crypto to fiat then make the purchase?
Expensive and slow, for both buyer and retailer. It’s adding a step that’s not necessary if you can accept crypto directly.”
It seems like this by itself would be an emerging market then....The business of transitioning crypto to fiat fast and cheap. Similar to market makers in the options market.
But I see a risk in whoever does this, in taking losses in the crypto it holds if the crypto market has a bad week. Or being stuck holding the bag if crypto does take a regular downturn....people offload their crypto for fiat...then buy back in at a lower level.
Market Makers that deal in the options market have a way of hedging their positions when they sell options by purchasing or shorting the underlying stock....
I cant see how a crypto “Market Maker” could do this to protect themselves
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