Facebook’s New Cryptocurrency Gets Big Backers
&gt; It has been a decade since bitcoin was born, yet consumers hardly use it—or the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies—to pay for things.<p>And why would they? Adding two extra steps to paying someone -- the buyer converting local currency to bitcoin, and then the seller converting bitcoin to local currency -- can never compete with just transferring local currency directly. Cryptocurrency was meant to be much more than just a payment system.<p>Cryptocurrencies will not succeed until they close the loop: people receive their wages in cryptocurrency, which they use to pay for consumer goods in retail stores that accept only cryptocurrency (because their suppliers would pay their employees in cryptocurrency).<p><i>This</i> is where cryptocurrency would shine, ie. by creating a global credit market, since the unit of account could be the same for e.g. Turkey, Nicaragua and Vietnam. A global cryptocurrency-credit market could arise, in which savers finance e.g. consumer goods on the shelves of retail shops. This would incentivize savers to purchase cryptocurrency in order to earn a low-risk return on their money -- something which is not possible to do in most Western economies with short-term interest rates at zero or below.<p><i>PS: If anyone is interested in creating the software infrastructure to make this happen, please let me know.</i>