After all this time watching cryptocurrency from a distance, I have finally seen a real world use case.

Marijuana is legal in this US state, however national banks are not allowed to service the marijuana industry due to federal law. Therefore all card processing is not available to the retail outlets. It’s only cash transactions at the retail level.

Until today. Today I was asked if I wanted to pay with a debit card. When I asked how, he said they used litecoin. So I imagine that the card is being run by a company which then converts it to litecoin to pay the merchant. Anyone have any clue on what that might cost the merchant as far as percentage?

I thought I would share this because after hearing all hype rollercoaster regarding cryptocurrency, I have finally seen a somewhat legitimate use of it in the real world.

Do you see any other use cases of crypto out in the wild these days?

Everyone hates ads. Frankly, no one wants to pay for anything online. And places like CoinHive offer a service that doesn't clutter the screen and pays people. Too good to be true right? Well the first group of people to latch on the service ramped up the mines to 8 threads at 100% because they were hackers and didn't care if they slowed your computer or drained your battery. They just wanted their almost untraceable money.

What I'm proposing is that if sites were to use miners that instead use 2/4 threads at 10% thereby using far less resources, across enough users provided your traffic is ok, could the results be tangible if we gave it a chance?

edit: I hate cryptocurrency but I was more trying to discuss the idea of getting paid for passive CPU usage more described in this comment by @spctrvl