Crypto's most famous narrative and one of its attributes that should make it a better currency than fiat is the absence of middlemen. There's absolutely no one that could block me from sending 10 sats to anyone in the world, or should I say "transferring sats from a wallet address to another". Blockchain transactions "can't be censored".
Bitcoin addresses are not attributed to any sort of IDs, we're simple users, one day a Bitcoin wallet might be in my possession and the next day that wallet can be hacked and I may no longer be the owner of those funds. That's applicable when we talk crypto as created and used on decentralized blockchains.
We all know that the decentralized has blended with the centralized and somehow we kind of need that in order to spread the mass adoption deeper into society. One example in this regard is crypto exchanges, which can be used as on and off ramps for crypto to fiat and fiat to crypto. I guess each of us has at least once in a life time used a CEX.
I use Binance quite often and I also use their VISA debit card for all sort of purchases. I don't spend BTC or ETH or anything volatile with it, but mostly BUSD or EUR. I have a nasty experience with it today that I want to share. I used the card to order myself a hoodie and after going through all the "fillings", right before the payment should have been made, I got myself the "transaction failed" message.
When I checked my online shop account the order wasn't registered as the payment was reordered as failed, but my BUSD were debited from my account. I know, it's probably a VISA issue and probably in a couple of days I'll have my funds back. It's not like they're gonna get stuck somewhere forever...
Called the customers support of the online shop I tried to use and the lady told me that they can see on their servers there has been a failed payment from my account, but no dime has reached their accounts, thus she advised me to reach out to my bank. You see, that's the problem, Binance is not a bank. It will probably be at some point in the future, but currently it's a crypto exchange trying to be a bank, based on how hard they try to be compliant with regulators.
I have a friend who has had some problems with his Binance card in the past and told me that there's no way reaching out to anyone from Binance. They have some customers support procedures, but it's just wasted time. Hence I don't even bother reaching out to "any middleman" for the situation, I actually don't even have a middleman to call in this case.
Crypto is about "no middlemen" involved in transactions, but at the current progress level we are at, in terms of mass adopting such currencies as payments currencies, that's not necessarily in our benefit. For the situation I'm dealing with, I'd definitely would have appreciated if I could simply call and ask for a fix.
I have no doubt that in the future many of the current flaws, or lets just call them drawbacks of crypto, will be fixed, but for the moment we're still dealing with issues where middlemen would have been nice to have at hand. It's part of the evolving process though and I'm not frustrated about it. I've got a bit pissed off at first, but that's the price I have to pay for being an early adopter.
I don't regret a second spent in this space though and I love crypto. I sure wish to do this for all of my life.
Thanks for attention,
Adrian
