3dfx Voodoo 5 5500. I remember thinking it was so cool that it had 2 chips on the same board: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_5

Chalupas (I think these are basically the same as their gorditas but with a fried shell)

And honestly their regular, basic beef soft tacos are pretty good, especially with some fire sauce (or whatever your preferred level of spice is).

This looks great, giving it a try now!

I agree there’s something to be said for this — If you have a above-board business that credit card companies don’t want to service because they think it makes them look bad, that should not shut you out of electronic payments yet that’s basically where we are at least in the US.

This is a little hard to balance with the fact that the same things that let you circumvent gatekeepers like credit card companies also make it attractive for genuinely immoral things, but that’s a trade-off. Every currency can be used for immoral things and just because cryptocurrency might make it a little easier doesn’t mean it’s inherently immoral.

That’s really the thing, isn’t it? In my experience cryptocurrency fees are quite high. I bet there’s a way to find a lower fee but then I’d have to do a ton of research and hope it’s accurate. I’d rather just pay a bank that requires me to do no research.

Thanks for your input, dingdong.

This isn’t Reddit, you don’t have to turn every discussion into a fight. I’m genuinely interested in cryptocurrency for reasons such as the article you linked: there are areas where traditional finance genuinely has failed to meet people’s needs. Providing a medium of exchange for the unbanked is a great example of something it could possibly help with, and I think that’s a good thing if it happens. But we should also be able to talk about the problems with cryptocurrencies and the cases where it doesn’t work as well as traditional finance. And if this prediction doesn’t pan out and cryptocurrency doesn’t become a major way of banking the unbanked, we should be able to consider what could accomplish that goal. It might be a different cryptocurrency, or a new thing inspired by cryptocurrency, or something that has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. After all, cryptocurrency is not a goal in itself.

See I think more nuanced takes like this are good. I’m not familiar with the Chinese banking issue that you are describing, but it sounds like deposit insurance (like the FDIC) might be a better solution than cryptocurrency, and it’s definitely better understood. Since the real world value of cryptocurrencies are so volatile they are a questionable store of value, and taking a risk on a poorly regulated bank might be better than taking a risk on storing your money in a volatile and unregulated security like cryptocurrency. Honestly it’s hard to know which is the better risk. So it could be better or it could be worse.

I agree with your point about transferring money internationally, and even within the US transferring money used to be a real pain. So I’m still interested to see if cryptocurrency can be a better medium of exchange or medium of transfer than traditional ways, or at least give traditional systems incentive to improve. But again the volatility is a concern so for most people the best move is probably to get in and out of the crypto market as quickly as possible or else risk getting a vastly different amount of money out of it than you put in. Admittedly it could appreciate, but when I’m transferring money to someone I don’t want that to simultaneously be an investment. The few times I have used Bitcoin to purchase something the whole process has taken hours, and there’s no guarantee there won’t be price swings — a lot could happen in those hours.

I appreciate the brutal honesty about cryptocurrency not being for the average Joe. It’s not that long since many cryptocurrency boosters were hoping it would replace fiat currency, but now that I think about it I haven’t heard as much about that recently. In its current state it is really not for the average Joe.

Sure, but what real-world problem does a trustless solve? I thought this was all very interesting years ago but now that we’ve had blockchain for years it seems it’s only good for illegal or morally questionable transactions.