There are some places in the more touristy parts of Havana Cuba that accept crypto as payment.

In general crypto is only going to be adopted in situations where there aren’t more convenient alternatives. Because of the embargo you cant use American bank cards to make purchases in Cuba. People are always going to use whatever is most convenient. In most cases that’s not going to be crypto. It’s the legal barriers that prevent using a normal credit card that create the situation where people would use crypto.

Crypto is, and always has been a way for money laundering to happen. Right now, its almost exclusively used bt speculators, corruption and Libertarian perverts.

I cant remember which Latin american country attempted to switch to it, but basically it just facilitated massive corruption. Same with the trump regime.

Its fucking stupid and only serves to enable corruption. Also, Jefferson Epstein was a crypto pervert

Unfortunately, few merchants are accepting crypto directly. There’s a bunch of reasons for this ranging from regulations, tax complications, price instability, and psychological burden. This can and hopefully will change in the long run, but I currently pay for most things via crypto by converting it to cash at point of sale. I have a debit/credit card called Ether.fi Cash; it gives 3% cash back, and spends against my holdings of crypto which earn ~5% interest while they sit waiting to be spent. That crypto can be in Ethereum, which is more unstable, but it can also be in dollar-pegged stable coins, meaning there’s no price fluctuation risk. Very, very happy with this card.

Referral code if you’re interested: https://www.ether.fi/refer/62107470

I get benefits from referring people but I wouldn’t post the link if I didn’t really believe in it. Only crypto card I’ve found that offers me substantial gains over traditional credit cards.

At one point in time, it had potential. In 2026, you’re either breaking the law or getting scammed.

bitcoin was a proof of concept for the distributed ledger. Since all money is just a unit of account the distributed ledger could keep track of things it was setup to show effort was done in the form of computer processing. Keep in mind its effort for efforts sake. So basically its like having a token that says you burned a barrel of oil. The creator I assume did not like the way inflation brought down the value of money so he programatically made the money (tokens) value inflate by progressively having the wasted effort increase. A token eventually require two barrels of oil burned, then four, etc. This unfortunately created a kind of frankenstein monster that is kinda useless for day to day payments but when it got on the radar of investment types caused it to be inflated through the roof from speculation. Other tokens worked to solve many of these issues but generally there has not been much interest in crypto that makes sense for day to day exchange like gridcoin. The reason is because those use the effort to create value and that is no way to get rich.

It is super annoying, slow, and expensive to use as a payment method. I had some ETH from when they were giving it away in fairly substantial amounts to anyone with a GPU back in 2021. I managed to spend it, but it’s hard to imagine any big number of normal people going through that much hassle more than once. And that was before the software ecosystem got to be full of malware.

We really really urgently need a better way to pay for stuff on the Internet. Somebody please make GNU Taler happen.

Are there countries, systems, spaces in the internet or anything that actually use crypto for paying?

Plenty of sites take crypto. Not as much that would make it especially useful, but keep an eye out.

I’ve been working with crypto for years and the fact that merchant services has been so neglected has been the most disappointing thing to me. Adoption is hard when everyone knee-jerks “scam” or they view it as too complicated and scary.

And since there’s no user-excitement, that kind of causes nobody to invest engineering time into building user-friendly systems for accepting and making payments. It’s just been more profitable to put that time into nonsense like trading, derivatives, and made up use cases for tokens.

VC money kind of ruins everything.

You can pay for some things using crypto. For example, VPNs often offer that as a somewhat anonymous payment method. I’m pretty sure 99.9% of transactions are for trading and crime/scams though. The original idea of a decentralized payment system has pretty much faded into the background.

How are you “Really into crypto” but asking these questions?

Crypto’s a lost cause. It’s used for laundering money and for ransom payments to threat actors. The Trump family is exploiting their power to exploit Stablecoins and skim money into their coffers.

Crypto was a novel idea that had its time in the sun, but now it’s lost its luster.

Good luck on whatever you’re doing with it… I hope you get what you’re looking for from it.

Nano is one of the examples of how a crypto currency can be used for payments. Unfortunately it’s all useless because the crypto space is dominated by speculative investments and scams.

I was paying for web hosting with monero quite a bit back in the day, but I actually don’t care about being anonymous that much and it’s really annoying so i don’t do that anymore

it’s pretty cool once you’ve got it into a wallet. you can use an API to make payments and spin up little bits of infrastructure.

Mullvad takes Monero

If you have a crypto wallet on CashApp, you can use it as payment for anything that accepts the Visa card attached to it. The only things I generally see that accept crypto directly are crypto companies or other BS in that vein.

It was a useful alternative to Western Union and other international currency transfer services many years ago, but I don’t have a current use case other than as part of a diversified asset portfolio. Relative to metals it’s easier to buy and sell if needed, and you still have custody of the goods.

One Bitcoin is still worth one Bitcoin, it’s the value relative to other currencies that is highly volatile.

It can be used for payments as others have stated, but can be a hassle since, in Australia at least, you have to declare all of it and pay capital gains taxes, generally requiring use of a third pay like Koinly to manage it.

I know this was the goal of Nano (XNO) originally. I still love the idea of it but with all the regulations and stuff now I think nano is kinda dead (or at least unpopular) It seems the only crypto used for transactions is Monaro.

I remember years ago hearing about a Minecraft server using it as “premium” currency which I thought was interesting. I think the idea was you could earn real money on their game server.

It’s so cheap now you could probably use it as currency for a game if you really wanted

Edit: not gonna lie I think Nano is a pretty cool name for a decentralized currency. Better than some of the weird coin names out there