First of all, global credit card volumes are much larger than Bitcoin volumes. Asia Pacific has been a bigger credit card market than the U.S. for some time - for example.

Secondly, credit cards payments are overwhelmingly payments for services or goods; effectively none of Bitcoin's total volume is in that category.

In fact, virtually all of Bitcoin volume is gross settlement and relates to speculative trading activity.

On-chain transactions are for a variety of things, but they are all payments, which was the criteria in question you brought up.

Regardless of how you might opine on those payments "merit" (I could equally deride the usefulness of plastic trinkets ordered from China on Amazon - for what good it would do), they are not insignificant on Bitcoin compared to legacy systems. They are all payments settled either from one party to another, or between one party's multiple accounts, and just because they are almost entirely "only" settlements does not imply they are somehow not useful or otherwise to be derided.

Where does that number even come from? I've been trying to source anything that's even vaguely in the same ballpark and coming up empty. Most of the sources I can find suggest ~$100bn a day.

But no, in any case, that's not what I'm talking about either. Nor am I trying to apply any moral value to the purposes to which payments are put.

The point is: you can't say "credit cards are small relative to BTC" without consider the segmentation of the payment market in the fiat world.

I encourage you to provide evidence of the size of the "credit card" usage (i.e. goods and services payments) of BTC. Good data is hard to find but it's self-evidently not in the "trillions of USD per year" order-of-magnitude.

If you want to talk about the gross settlements segment, again, BTC is a minnow. Sure counting every transaction on the BTC blockchain, it's a few $tn a year currently. Fedwire does that much every day, and that's only for inter-institutional transfer.

You said "credit cards amount to $3tn of payments [my emphasis] in the U.S annually.", doing so as if this somehow made crypto appear small. I pointed out that Bitcoin alone does more than this per year in payments since 2018, and that there are thousands of other crypto projects. Many of these are also making comparable numbers of payments.

By the simple metric of how much value cryptocurrency users are transmitting with each other as payments, versus how much users of credit cards are doing - which was the original framing as I understood it - crypto wins. And of course it does, you may be right its an apples to hand grenades comparison, but the simple fact of the matter is we are comparing apples to hand grenades.

In some ways this is all about as useful as comparing how many miles horses and carts are doing versus steam or combustion engines.

The point is, even early on, per mile travelled, engines win. And they do so not just because they can travel further faster, but because they enable new use-cases by doing so - just like crypto.

Crypto has been here for ten years already and despite being derided as a toy early on, is now worth, and transferring, trillions.

See you after the next ten years, when credit cards will almost certainly be as VHS tapes are now.