Ask HN: What is your opinion on DAI a stable cryptocurrency built on Ethereum?

In my opinion, it's delusional (at least for now) to believe that a massive amount of businesses will start accepting crypto like Bitcoin without selling it at the market value automatically. Businesses need stability and we can't ask them to trust a currency that can lose 80% of its value in a few months.

Businesses want stability but they also want to maximize their revenue by eliminating unnecessary costs. The current credit card processing fees are around 2-3% which is huge! By accepting a stablecoins like DAI instead of credit card payment a businesses could save a lot of money.

I would be curious to hear what HN thinks about this.

Edit: You can learn more about it here: https://makerdao.com/

How do you save the 2-3% processing fee? People will continue using their Visa / Mastercard credit cards so you'd have to persuade for profit businesses that do processing currently to use DAI and lose their income from fees. Not going to happen. You'd need to offer alternative payment method and somehow persuade people to switch.

That sounds simple when you say it but persuading merchants adding new exotic payment methods is a tall order. Do they need to buy a new device for processing DAI payments? That is extra expense they don't want. It would depend heavily on how the integration is done.

Do you need to train their stuff how to accept new payment method? Also now they are holding money in multiple places (bank account for normal payments, some wallet for DAI) so this introduces another overhead for them to handle.

How many people will pay with DAI? Will it be more than 0.01% of customers? Because there are almost no people who own DAI (nobody outside of crypto bubble), so you have problem on customer side. And why would merchant go through the trouble of supporting new payment method when it will be only used by a minuscule number of people (there are merchants that tried supporting Bitcoin payments and it turned out they had like 1-2 people paying in BTC in months so they don't bother anymore.)

I don't see it happening personally unless it can be done in a completely seamless way (for both merchants and customers) and I don't think that's the case. Existing payment methods are too entrenched and very convenient. People actually like using credit cards / Apple Pay etc. It's easy and user friendly.

The few places that accepted Bitcoin payments back in the day when it was trendy, it looked really weird and inefficient, people scanning QR codes, having to use special mobile apps to handle the payment instead of POS merchant already has and knows how to use. Seemed kind of pointless.

This seems to be the equivalent of saying "I don't want to use the internet because it's too slow" in 2001. There are numerous organizations working on ways to reduce crypto processing fees, one of the most advanced in certainly Plasma: https://plasma.io/

1. What are the costs of your solution? Who's running the nodes, how much does it cost? Gas? Give me some numbers please.

2. Scaling. Current state - it doesn't scale. My own opinion is it will never scale, centralised systems will always be much more performant.

3. Not really. The only difference is Bitcoin is very volatile and most people are expecting it will rise in value so they are not spending, you are right. But as a payment system integration wise it would be the same as your proposed solution, some mobile app and scanning of QR codes.

Finally, give me a single reason why it would be better than current system (as I believe the answer to 1. it's not cheaper, it's actually more expensive as centralised system). And that was the only reason you have given. Is there anything else than theoretically lower fees (which I don't believe would be the case).