Do you believe in the mystery tokens in a cryptographically secured distributed ledger?
"Cryptocurrency" for short, is a term that is used to describe a particular kind of tokens—the ones that are backed up by real money just like how the US dollar was backed by gold. The technology is simple, really: original Bitcoin uses proof-of-work — a way to verify participants in the networks and to filter out malicious actors.
It is very elegant, indeed: the power is in the agreement between independent parties, this agreement is called a protocol, in the same way as we use network protocols to make our devices communicate and so on.
The cryptography part is also fascinating — the fact that we can construct a system such that it can be exposed to malicious actors without the risk of them breaking it. Same as we use HTTPS to hide out traffic in transit to the site from malicious actors (or your own provider). These concepts underline the very substrate of our technology.
Now, that is all well and good, but how can we profit from it? I hear you asking. And that's exactly why we came up with thousands of different variations of the protocols, funny token tames like DOGE and reasonably shady cryptocurrency exchanges and marketplaces which can lock out all of your assets if you are not careful enough in doing your homework.
You see, the original idea of truly decentralized infrastructure where everybody owns their own assets is very tempting. Problem is, the user experience is so convoluted and obfuscated—in almost the same way you would have a die-hard bureaucrat obfuscate the matters just for the chance to prove themselves useful.
And thus we end up gas fees, network fees, miner fees, transaction fees—and finally—conversion fees. All of those previous ones consider just one network, but there is a high chance that I want to pay with ETH on ERC20 through Coinbase payment gateway. Tough luck, they use their own network called BASE, so I better convert my ERC20 ETH to BASE ETH (that'd cost commission, of course, electricity isn't cheap ya'know).
Another chance is that you don't have ETH, but BTC or some other coin. Just convert it—and pay service fee and withdrawal fee. Don't forget to withdraw some extra, because by the time you are going to pay the chances are that the rate has changed so you might be short of an equivalent of $0.01.
The idea is truly marvelous—you can potentially exchange money all over the world without "greedy banks" and "totally private". But as it stands now, you have to verify yourself with a photo of a passport on any major exchange (because it helps battle fraud) and then jump through some fancy hoops along the way to pay, paying premium along each step of the way.
SWIFT commission is bigger, yes. But at least it is somewhat predictable one-time payment, not a maze riddled by scammers on every turn. You could always suggest me to educate myself, though. Because obviously there are ways to do it properly. You just have to sift through weeds in order to get to those.