How Many Use Cases Are There Now For Bitcoin?

While Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have become fully established for things like investing and trading, finding places to use them in daily life has always proven a little trickier. Despite the years that have passed, vendors and providers often remain hesitant in accepting crypto as a payment form, so we’re looking today at those areas where the most progress has been made in different types of market.

Online Services

Perhaps naturally thanks to being firmly rooted online, Bitcoin payments are most commonly accepted by Internet retailers and service providers. It hasn’t yet reached the level of universal acceptance, and in many places usage can be limited, although some industries have embraced it far more strongly.

In particular, the online casino industry was one of the earliest adopters of crypto payments. If you look around for any kind of slot game or even live casino online, the sites you find have an extremely high chance of accepting Bitcoin. There are even entire sites dedicated to crypto, and for those few places where it isn’t accepted directly, there are digital wallets that can act as a middle point for both deposits and withdrawals.

Daily Shopping

Once we move to primarily offline uses of crypto, the options quickly dry up, and in the UK specifically, doing your daily shop at Tesco or Asda or the like is effectively impossible still. As a whole, the biggest UK retailers have avoided taking any kind of direct crypto payments, although the largest supermarkets will now accept it purely for buying gift cards as an intermediary.

In worldwide terms, there are signs that the tide is turning toward brick-and-mortar shops accepting at least Bitcoin. Both Burger King and KFC have experimented in smaller markets with taking Bitcoin directly in-store, even if only for short-term offers. In the UK, the ‘digital Pound’ concept may put paid to the idea in the long run though.

Large Purchases

The final frontier of crypto payments has to be in large-scale purchases, meaning things like real estate, luxury items and so on. The core complication with Bitcoin is that, thanks to being untethered to a regular fiat currency, the value can fluctuate. As a result, the larger the purchase, the more there is potentially to lose for whoever is selling if prices suddenly dip.

It’s unlikely we’ll ever see traditional home purchases made entirely via crypto for that reason, although there is certainly some kind of real estate up for sale. Through the virtual Metaverse platform, it is now possible to buy virtual real estate for prices comparable to real life, and even huge brand names like Forbes are getting involved in the process. Crypto is the de facto currency for much of the Metaverse, and that makes it probably the only place where any kind of property purchase can be made via crypto.

Despite the meteoric rise of cryptocurrency originally, it seems as though acceptance has not gone quite so quickly. It is still early in the process as tech goes, however, so there’s no telling what could change over the next few years.