Let’s take a simple use case: buying mullvad vpn.

You can use your credit card, which does tie your identity to mullvad (which doesn’t really matter because if they get subpoenaed by the police, the police will give them your account number once they find it and mullvad will be able to find your logs).

In that case the process is pretty straightforward. I click on “pay with credit card”, the website redirects me to the payment platform, I enter my card number, I get redirected back to mullvad and they give me a code I use in the app to add one more month. It cost me 5$ exactly which is a nice integer and I didn’t have to enter it anywhere anyway. My card was automatically debited for the amount and I receive text confirmation that I indeed paid the amount.

The price is important though, and we’ll come back to that later, because no matter the price of the item – 1.37$, 0.99$, 1067.98$, I can pay it with my card without hassle.

Or… you can buy mullvad by going to a third party seller and buying a card with bitcoin or monero.

In the latter case, you first select how many items you want – these are digital cards much like gift cards you’d buy in stores, but instead of being like 10$ or 50$ they are for 1 month or 6 months of vpn.

Then you click on purchase and get redirected to a page that shows how many bitcoin you have to pay for this item. You have exactly 1 hour to pay that price, as crypto is highly volatile.

You note down the minute number of BTC, something like 0,000093808 BTC, and then go on your wallet. If you have BTC on it, that is. I have a Binance account (which is tied to your real identity as well) and bought the required amount of BTC. First problem: you can’t buy less than 10$ in BTC on Binance. So alright, I buy 11$ worth of BTC just because I want to see how this works.

Then I copy the long, unreadable wallet address (a huge string of characters like 3FZbgi29cpjq2GjdwV8eyHuJJnkLtktZc5) and at this point I realise it’s not gonna work buying on PC and logging on Binance on my phone. So I log in on Binance on my PC, find my wallet, withdraw to the address that the site gave me.

Problem two: you can’t withdraw less than some arbitrary amount of, I think, 0,0001 BTC. You have to count the 0s and see how much that is worth in real money. About 10$, so then you start doing calculations and try to buy 2 1-month codes for 10$ and see if that’s enough for your app to let you withdraw your BTC.

So I went back to credit card. But what if you wanted to remain anonymous and really don’t want to give out your address? Well, you can buy with monero. Make an account on some anonymous platform and look at the marketplace. You will buy monero coins from people that sell them. Except… everyone has their own way of selling them – some give you payment terminals and you still pay by card, some need a convoluted escrow system on a third party website. And you have to trust they will not rip you off. If you gave me 0.000000002189717 BTC instead of the 0.000000002189817 I should get, I’m not gonna notice. And then you also have hidden fees on top of that so even if I go through p2p markets, I’m not sure I’ll even have enough to buy the card at the end!

And then you get some dust amount left in your wallet that is completely useless because no platform will accept it, it’s too small an amount. When I say small, it can be something like 1 cent. But you know who will accept 1 cent? Any store that accepts cash or credit card. And they don’t give me useless 0.0001$ as change.

And then to actually get your 1 month code you need to wait some more for the purchase to be verified and your code to be issued. Though I’ll admit I haven’t got to that step, maybe it takes 2 seconds, maybe it takes 2 hours.

Supporters of crypto will say it’s still in its infancy. But it has been in its infancy for more than 10 years without major fundamental changes. Even cities that tried crypto pilot projects (letting people pay with BTC in stores for example) stopped them, because it’s so unwieldy and volatile. Paying 0.000000000000135832518 BTC for your coke at the gas station one day and a slightly different amount that you can’t even humanely registers two hours later helps no one.