Which is why consumers enthusiastically abandoned them for credit the moment they could. Purposefully going backwards is both silly, and something you’ll never convince the average consumer to do.
Consumers didn't enthusiastically abandon cash. Credit cards were introduced in the 60s, it took several decades for credit cards to overtake cash and it only happened because of the convenience factor for credit vs carrying cash as well as alternative debit cards that work just like credit cards. Credit was regularly rejected by stores and businesses as recently as one decade ago.
I don't use dispute resolution unless someone actually stole my credit card number like when my card info was jacked at a gas pump one time. Credit cards are quite insecure and we still have to type in all our personal info online every single transaction which is dangerous and dumb and makes the whole system vulnerable to credit card fraud in a way that crypto isn't. When you use crypto you simply sign a transaction message, you don't have to give away your private keys to make the transaction occur.
Folks didn't 'enthusiastically abandon' sound money for credit (or even the early IOUs which were a sort of primitive cash) the moment they could. You're retconning a bit there. Folks were extremely reluctant for a long time on account of all the schemes and fraud. Sound familiar?
That's just what humans do to each other. New tech is always like this when there are gains to be made.
Some folks look at the trend that central banks have been on and the creep of financial surveillance and think purposefully going backward in some areas isn't silly at all.
In the end, it's software you don't have to use. Nobody is forcing anyone to opt in, right (you know, like the credit bureaus who in America force you to opt in if you intend to... I dunno, participate in the economy in a meaningful way)?
Consumers adopt the currency that is most convenient to them. The lack of adoption of bitcoin after 12 years of existence shows quite clearly that bitcoin doesn't have the properties that consumers want in a payments system. Until that changes, bitcoin stands no chance of becoming a medium of exchange. It might continue to be mildly popular as a get-rich-quick-for-free scheme for some time though.
You're still kinda waving that broad brush. For one, not every consumer is most concerned with primarily with convenience (lots of scams are convenient as hell), especially tech-savvy folks in 2021 who have begun to internalize the fact that conveniences always come at a cost. There are lots of super convenient services that I could use to move money around but which I don't use because I am not comfortable with the trade-offs (primarily financial surveillance and security concerns).
Second, adoption is way up and btc is only one cryptocurrency. It gets first-mover advantage in this market (unfairly, probably) and so continues to be a bellwether despite the fact that it is a relative dinosaur, technology wise. I'm fine with that, personally, despite the problems with the technology.
That you haven't adopted the tech doesn't mean that adoption is failing, you know. There are more users every year (this is difficult to pin down for obvious & good reasons, but the indicators are solid) and no technology with millions of users globally, including institutional adopters, can be said to be failing.
Further, to call any payments technology 'mildly popular' which safeguards USD 1.5-2.5 trillion (total cryptocurrency market cap, BTC accounting for over 760 billion alone, despite the recent corrections) in deflationary wealth undermines your argument to the point of bad faith. Is the cryptocurrency market overheated and full of nonsense? Of course. But let's do the analyses with level heads at least.
Bitcoin is just one crypto. But the fact that Paypal accepts crypto as of a couple months ago isn't enough to show you adoption is happening? Or that Visa is settling USDC payments on Ethereum? https://finance.yahoo.com/news/visa-settles-usdc-transaction...
Humans have been using credit systems for millennia. The implication that in the olden days people only walked around with bits of gold in their pockets is a bit of “retconning.”
I think my use of the word 'credit' was a distraction here and that's my bad, but folks absolutely walked around with valuable metals to use as a medium of exchange when moving other valuables was very difficult or impossible. And there were scams then, same as there are scams now. I don't want to type out of the whole history of money as I understand it (Jack Weatherford's book was pretty good), but suffice it to say that history repeats because humans-as-behavior-machines are repetitive.
Credit cards didn't exist 1000 years ago. We aren't debating about credit systems. And yes, people walked around with shiny pieces of metal in their pocket that they used for transactions for thousands of years. At some point after the printing press was invented, the move to paper currency occurred.
Well, the parent post was saying that people were initially hesitant to move to credit systems, so I'm confused. :)
If we're talking specifically about credit cards, the credit card went from new invention to ubiquity in a couple of decades. But I think that's too narrow a scope to look at, to be honest.
Early credit systems did not depend upon the printing press; think of the widespread use of tally sticks in medieval Europe to enable illiterate low-technology credit systems.
It's really hard to approach this anthropologically, IMO, because so many other variables change. Less complex economies do fine with "local communism" and person-to-person debt, but it's hard to imagine using such a thing to order from Amazon. Conversely, coinage historically was useful if you had to exchange with someone with whom you didn't have a personal relationship (say, you're traveling to a faraway land and you can't just provide an IOU), but that's somewhat obsolete now.
I guess my conclusion would be that these historical analogies don't shed a lot of light.
I'm actually really interested in learning more about historic transitions between different system of currency. I've found lots of information on Wikipedia about the steady states, but less on the transitions. Any sources you can recommend?
Jack Weatherford's book on the history of money was pretty good. Lots of tracing the transitional periods as valuables give way to abstractions give way to further abstractions on the abstraction-- and documenting where they chafe (reliably, they do).
I don't know where you're sitting right now. I'm sitting in Europe, and credit card transactions are quite common where I live. Europe is a big place. Even within the EU there is plenty of room for difference.
A generalisation like this is no better than the frequent occurrence of HNers posting articles headlined with "the nation" which mean "the USA".
