Bitcoin vs Altcoins: Which Cryptocurrency Is the Most Usable as Money?

It's no secret that most mainstream economists don't think too highly of cryptocurrencies. Not only have Bitcoin, Ethereum and the rest produced the "greatest bubble in history," but they're "neither a serious method of payment nor a good way to store capital" — at least according to the Bank of America and Nouriel "Dr Doom" Roubini, respectively.

However, while traditional financial experts have spent countless hours complaining that the volatility of cryptocurrencies renders them unviable as actual currency, it is possible to use them as money in a wide variety of places and to spend them on everything from pizzas to shoes.

But which cryptocurrency is the most usable as money? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer to this question is Bitcoin, simply because it's accepted as a payment more widely than any other cryptocurrency. But as this analysis will show, other currencies are being increasingly accepted by retailers and companies, and given their superior scalability, they may end up overtaking the original cryptocurrency in the coming months and years.

                        Bitcoin accepted here:-

There's no single authoritative list of all the companies in the world that accept cryptocurrencies as payment, although there are a number of aggregators and websites that offer a general overview of who is accepting what. The most helpful is arguably Virtual Coin Squad, since even though it doesn't quite boast the most extensive catalogue of merchants now accepting cryptocurrencies, it actually lists companies together with all the cryptocurrencies they accept. As such, it provides a clear insight into which cryptocurrency is the most widely used as a means of payment.

54 major companies currently accept cryptocurrencies, according to Virtual Coin Squad (although the real number is much higher), and only two of them — MazeFit (sportswear) and Shiny Leaf (cosmetics) — don't accept Bitcoin. The other 53 – including Microsoft, Expedia, Mozilla, and Shopify – all accept BTC, while 25 accept Litecoin, 13 accept Ethereum, 14 accept Bitcoin Cash, 12 accept Monero, and 15 accept Dogecoin. In other words, Bitcoin is the most usable cryptocurrency as a method of payment, for the simple reason that any merchant that accepts any crypto is almost certain to accept Bitcoin, while the same can't be said for other coins.Of course, a list of only 55 companies isn't exactly exhaustive, but there are other, more extensive resources which corroborate this picture.The same goes with the information provided by Coinmap, which enables users to search a map of the world for businesses that accept cryptocurrencies. Here, a search of New York City, for example, reveals 136 such businesses within the central area of the city — overlapping Manhattan and Brooklyn. Many of these deal exclusively in Bitcoin, such as a number of delicatessens — e.g. Brooklyn's Tony Deli, Big Boy Deli, and G Line Deli — that house their own Bitcoin ATMs.

                                 Cross-border settlements and paying your taxes:-

There's a variety of other less direct evidence that also reveals the superior popularity of Bitcoin in comparison to other cryptocurrencies. For instance, Cambridge University published its Global Cryptocurrency Benchmarking Study in April 2017, which for the first time provided a systematic study of alternative payment systems. While it didn't focus exclusively on payments by consumers to companies, it nonetheless discovered that 86 percent of cryptocurrency payment companies use Bitcoin as their primary payment rail for cross-border payments.

Such payments cover a variety of uses — from international money transfers to business-to-business payments and merchant services — so they don't directly equal evidence that, say, Bitcoin is accepted by 86 percent of the companies that let customers pay using cryptocurrency. Still, they indicate that Bitcoin is the most used cryptocurrency for payments, which in turn would indicate that anyone wanting to buy something with crypto would be best advised to hold on to some Bitcoin, since the system is currently geared more for dealing with Bitcoin payments than with those in any other digital currency.

That said, it may not stay this way for long. Aside from the increasingly popular range of payment services that let companies charge using a number of cryptocurrencies, moves have been made in various nations that would promote the use of crypto more generally for use with payments. In South Korea, the country's largest exchange, Bithumb, has been securing partnerships with a number of online platforms, including WeMakePrice and Yeogi Eottae. Under the terms of these deals, the platforms involved will be able to accept payments in a range of currencies (including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, and ICON), while Bithumb is also pushing hard for such deals and initiatives to be accepted elsewhere in South Korea.

                                        Adoption steadily growing:-

While the foregoing shows that other cryptocurrencies may hold the key to the future, it doesn't necessarily address the popular conception among some high-profile critics that Bitcoin and its rivals aren't 'real money.' In a now (in)famous blog post trashing blockchains, for instance, Kai Stinchcombe wrote in April that the "number of retailers accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment is declining," basing this sweeping assertion on a single Morgan Stanley report which found that, out of 500 "top online merchants," the number of them accepting Bitcoin as payment decreased — between 2016 and 2017 — from five to three.

However, Bach Nguyen of SatoshiLabs informed Cointelegraph that the overall number is actually increasing. “A year ago, there were 9085 venues registered [with Coinmap],” he states. "Today, there are 12,801 venues registered.”