Credit card fee hikes in recent years have brought to the surface some questions about traditional financial institutions and their instruments and created some debates among their effectiveness and that of cryptocurrencies. Many reports indicate that there are significant savings in payments processed with cryptocurrencies, but as creatures of habit, most people still prefer their banking cards over crypto transactions. Still, it seems that we are just a few years from established universal blockchain and crypto integration. Even today there are some major advancements that make a solid case for choosing crypto over credit. Here are some of the more significant ones.
This actually might be the single most important difference between crypto and credit cards. The user of a crypto wallet needs to give explicit permission and has full control over its financials when a transaction is occurring. It is up to the user of the wallet to decide under what terms, when and what amount he wants to transact. On the other hand, banks have full control over your money and personal data and have automated all of their processes to simply pull money out of your bank account at any given time.
This is closely linked with the point above. Users of crypto need to display their public address to receive payments and need to personally initiate any transaction in which they are sending money. The user is the only one with access to their funds via their private key. At no point can merchant access the user’s funds. They can only send to the user or receive after the user has initiated a transaction. This completely eliminates security problems, scams, and hidden fees associated with banking cards, since users of banking cards give their bank full access to their funds, which may lead to security risk or exploitation on the banker’s end. Credit cards are notorious for the latter, with hidden fees being a common concern linked to their services. With crypto, this aspect as a whole is eliminated.
Low transactional fees were one of the main initial selling points for cryptocurrencies. Although that hasn’t been true with Bitcoin lately, that still leaves us with hundreds of other projects that have successfully implemented a low fee transaction schedule. This means being able to pay just a fraction of a dollar for basically any payment, making this an attractive offer for everyone so much so that even crypto to fiat conversion presents itself with more usable rate than credit cards.
As we all know, our personal information and identity are tightly connected to the credit cards and banks we use. This can create several issues with transactions, travelling, or even doing business overseas (sometimes domestically too!) since these things often include long, bureaucratic processes and the smallest mistake or inconsistency will halt the process. Many factors may contribute to complicating the process as well, including loss of documentation, emigration, or even things such as age and financial history. Cryptocurrencies, however, are like cash- easy to use anywhere, anytime, for anything. In fact- since they don’t need to be converted based on the country or region, they are even more convenient than cash, and certainly a much more preferable alternative to credit cards.