Crypto Usability: The Most Important Recurring Theme of This Industry

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The usability of crypto is one of the most recurring themes in the entire space. People who use crypto, speculate on the price, trade it and even people on the outside looking in… one thing that they all have in common is that they are wondering how this stuff will get used on a daily basis.

Coming from Hive, I think we have a unique perspective of how crypto can be used in the right environment. I’ll speak from personal experience for this point:

Hive is a cryptocurrency that I personally feel has a lot of utility. Hive is an ecosystem of its own. Call it an echo chamber or call it a social media platform… whatever you decide to call it, it’s a social ecosystem where we all have a voice that extends beyond just the words we decide to click post on.

The voice we have stems into the currency we deploy in our accounts. We call that Hive Power. Power is a great term for it because it literally fuels your activities on Hive. Resource Credits (RCs) are irrelevant for most regular users of Hive, but the currency is useful in terms of supporting other creators, building your brand on Hive, signaling your personal belief in the chain, etc.

In the past, I’ve written about this idea that Hive is not just a place for us to post and interact with each other, but it is a place where we store a digital identity. A digital clone of ourselves, if you will. Whenever you want, you can check-in on someone’s identity on Hive. You can look up their HIVE POWER, you can see what they’ve done with their account, etc. You can see if they play games like Splinterlands or if they’re active with Actifit or if they’re investing in second-layer tokens like LEO and trading the markets.

Crypto Usability Raising the Tide

Stepping back from Hive and talking about the broader crypto space — we’re seeing a lot of developments on the user-friendliness and access to crypto.

Crypto onramps (places where people can exchange fiat for crypto) are growing in both numbers and usability. The exchanges/interfaces/companies/protocols are all improving.

The tides of crypto are rising and as we see all of these developments continue to pop-up and mature, we’re going to see the entire crypto industry mature. Whether you’re an investor in BTC, ETH or HIVE, I believe that it should be a vital part of your regular activities to read about and understand the developments of crypto onramps.

This space is so incredibly interwoven that what’s good for BTC is good for HIVE. What’s good for HIVE is good for BTC. So on and so forth. While most people fight like tribes over their different coins and protocols, I believe that we should focus our energy on creating better products/services than the traditional finance industry, social media companies, etc.

PayPal & Crypto.com


(Sundry Photography/Shutterstock)

2 days ago it was leaked or “announced” that PayPal and one of their subsidiaries — Venmo — are working on a way to allow their millions of customers to trade/send Bitcoin and other crypto currencies.

While many in the space continue to have mixed feelings about these large corporations getting involved in Bitcoin, I tend to think that this is a great thing for all of us.

The more people that we can get sending/utilizing crypto on a regular basis, the better. Even the fact that PayPal offers crypto buying in their services adds a level of toughness to the overall narrative of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

Of course, it’s our job as existing users and proponents of Bitcoin and Crypto to teach these new users the importance of private key management, holding your crypto outside of platforms like PayPal and the other core aspects of what makes crypto so important to the world.


Source: Crypto.com

The story of crypto.com is another one that I’ve been following with a close eye. Crypto.com is yet another controversial topic in the world of crypto (hell, what isn’t controversial in this industry), but they tend to be a landing page of sorts for many new entrants and potential entrants in crypto.

This integration with opencart is a signaling of how crypto is going widespread. Mergers, acquisitions, partnerships, etc. are how we’ll “infect” the masses with cryptocurrencies and the benefits of holding/utilizing them.

When you combine all of these developments and include the progress of projects like Hive, I believe that we’re seeing an explosive trend in the usability of crypto. Most of the world doesn’t see what’s happening under the hood of this space, but to those of us who spend our time here each day, things are changing at an incredible pace.


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5 comments
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I think the usability factor is indeed important and why I’m spending my time investing my time and energy in 3 crypto’s that I think will be very useful in the future:
Hive
BAT
PRE

We all know the hive and many know BAT but Presearch is something that’s not getting a lot of press but it’s going to revolutionize the way searches are done and advertising is accomplished. I wrote about it here back in February.

I invest my money in some other tokens here and there but investing my time in these projects for their usability factor is big for me. Let me know if you check out Presearch and what you think! As always, I have my referral link if you’d like to give it a whirl. It’s fun making small amounts of money for doing normal things.

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So, are you saying that it is possible to use crypto in Paypal but not keep it in your account on Paypal? That's interesting. I really like the idea of using Crypto to pay for whatever.

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I think mentally, we need to separate crypto as a trading commodity and crypto as a currency. When we hold crypto for capital appreciation, the price does tend to go up as there is demand for it, yet it sits stagnant in wallets.

However, if we acquire crypto for the purpose of spending, it has the capacity to zip around the economy. That velocity of money tends to raise the price as well, but in a more natural way.

My hypothesis is that cryptos that are made for spending, like LTC and Dash, tend to have lower, yet somewhat more stable prices than the speculative cryptos. Speculative cryptos, like BTC, mostly have transactions related to trading rather than commerce. The trading is crowding out the commerce utility of BTC. It happens at times with ETH too. Sometimes gas fees have been too high, so I wait for the network to be less busy to do a transaction.

Speaking from anecdotal evidence, I usually convert fiat to LTC or Dash to buy things because they are faster and have lower transaction fees. As Crypto.com gains a larger foothold, I may add CRO to my preferred payment tokens.

I would use HBD or Hive for transactions, except that I don't have a direct buy option for Hive. I have to use fiat to buy Dash in order to buy Hive or HP. Perhaps when my account is larger and I have some Hive or HBD to throw around, I can look for places to spend it.

Ultimately, usability for me means having somewhere to spend cryptos. I do like buying, holding, and making capital gains. However, that's a different game from using cryptos for what they were built to do.

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Yeah, one of the reasons Hive and Steem fly under the regulatory radar I think is because we require more effort to get to the Hive tokens through buying other tokens and exchanging it.

Litecoin definitely is a commerce token I think as well, it's meant for being spent and I think will be one of the major ones in the future that gets used in daily transactions. At least that's what I'm hoping since I've invested a decent amount in Litecoin lol

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Crypto usability is spreading beyond more and more amd i am super glad about the development. People now pay for goods and services with cryptocurrency in the real world. Fantastic i must say.

#NOWPayment has made it even more easier and i am seeing a lot of success in the adaptation of their product.

You might want to check it out and write about it someday.

Here is the link
https://nowpayments.io

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