One of the biggest aims of any crypto card is to make accessing, exchanging and using cryptocurrency as simple as using any other currency, with effective on-ramping to make the process easy, straightforward and swift.
The long-term ambition with any system that makes crypto more accessible is to make it a more versatile and viable form of currency, one that can reasonably and realistically be used to make everyday purchases.
Right now, a card with crypto support makes it easy to buy a coffee and invest in crypto, but the goal of a project like Bitcoin has always been to make it so you can buy a coffee with crypto without spending orders of magnitude in transaction fees in the process.
Many retailers do accept some form of crypto, but as of yet, it is not quite the norm. To look at whether it could be, it is worth going back to the time when an early adopter and crypto evangelist was hungry enough to make history.
Two Large Pizzas, One Giant Leap
The making of crypto history began on 18th May 2010, when a programmer from Florida by the name of Laszlo Hanyecz announced to the Bitcointalk.org forum that he would be willing to trade 10,000 BTC for two large pizzas.
At the time, this was worth $41, making each pizza $20.50. This was a bit of a markup, but at the time it took just 200 blocks of mining to generate that much Bitcoin, and it was worth it to prove a point.
The cryptocurrency launched on 3rd January 2009, but whilst the concept had drawn some interest in the wake of the Great Recession and the bailouts of several banks deemed too big to fail, little had been done with the currency in the following 15 months.
Much had been said about crypto’s potential and possible value, but both of these elements were almost entirely hypothetical ambitions, the reality of which was difficult to explain to people who struggled with basic principles such as how a Bitcoin wallet actually held the currency and not a mere representation.
Plenty of people in the space mulled over this issue, and this was when Mr Hanyecz decided he would rather ruminate over it with a slice of pizza.
It took him four days to find someone willing to buy and send him a pizza in exchange for his 10,000 BTC, which it must be noted is worth over $600m according to modern BTC prices.
Since then, every 22nd May has been dubbed Bitcoin Pizza Day, as a celebration of the bitcoin community, as this was the purchase that actually made Bitcoin, and by extension cryptocurrency as a whole, legitimate.
In practice, it was more of a barter than a transaction, as Jeremy “jercos” Sturdivant received the bitcoins and spent his own money to order from Papa John’s pizza to deliver to Mr Hanyecz, but the spirit of the transaction was there.
These two pizzas were important, but they also beg an important question; why has crypto not become the future of money and purchases as we know them?
How Far Away Is The Future?
There have been plenty of attempts to make cryptocurrency an alternative payment option for a lot of different online and offline retail establishments, and to this day there are shops that offer crypto as an option, even if they are fewer in number than they were a few years ago.
The problem with crypto as a currency is the same reason why many people want to invest in the first place; volatility.
Cryptocurrencies go up and down in price far faster than the completion of a transaction via the blockchain, particularly one that uses Bitcoin’s proof of work verification model.
There were several reports in the mid-2010s of bars accepting crypto for payments for food and drink, only for the wait staff to have to bring the machine back as Bitcoin or Ether’s price had fallen before the transaction went through and they needed to pay extra for the remainder they owed.
This situation was the reason why online video game platform Steam dropped support for crypto payments in December 2017, and is something that would need to be fixed before crypto became not only a currency to exchange, speculate and use to buy blockchain assets but something to buy coffee with.
There have been attempts to build something better, faster and more stable, and at some point, there is very much the potential for a future where cryptocurrency becomes the standard, but outside of El Salvador, that future has not arrived yet.