Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Etherium, published a blog post about this. He mentioned several instances in his life where he has had trouble paying for things with crypto - and more. Buterin said that there are many problems associated with commissions that are hardly obvious to the average user.

What are the disadvantages of cryptocurrencies?

Back in 2013, Vitalik tried to pay for sushi at a restaurant in San Francisco. Thanks to the Internet, he learned that the place accepted bitcoins for payment, so Buterin wanted to test the feature.

The first problem the legendary developer encountered was a poor Internet connection on his device. Because of that, he was unable to quickly transfer BTCs, as the transaction simply wouldn’t translate to the blockchain. As a result, he had to look for a place with Wi-Fi.

From this Vitalik concludes: cryptocurrency payment systems need a function to transmit payment data via NFT, QR code and so on, to exclude potential problems with the Internet. In this case, the user could not broadcast the transaction itself to the blockchain and conduct it, but only share the signature of the transaction with the owner of the establishment. Transaction signing is easily done offline: in particular, this is how Ledger hardware wallets, already familiar to us, work.

The second such incident occurred in 2021, when Vitalik tried to pay with crypto at an Argentine coffee shop during a meeting with a friend. The establishment did not officially accept digital assets, but the owner recognised Vitalik and offered to transfer ETH to his exchange wallet address. Here’s how Buterin describes it.

Unfortunately, my first transaction of 0.003 ETH was not accepted – probably because it was less than the exchange’s minimum deposit of 0.01 ETH. I sent another 0.007 ETH. Both transactions were soon confirmed. I didn’t mind the threefold overpayment and regarded it as a tip.

According to Cointelegraph’s sources, the creator of Etherium also noted the importance of detailing the user’s spending on fees in the cryptocurrency wallet interface. If a transfer fails, the user should immediately know the reason for the failed transaction and how to correct the problem.

A user interface with all the necessary information is better, even if it is not as pretty in terms of design. Buterin continues.

The user experience is judged by the worst cases. A clean and pretty interface that does some strange unexplainable things and leads to bigger problems 0.723 percent of the time is worse than a user interface that reveals more details about the transaction and makes it easier to fix any problem that occurs.


In this case, Buterin alludes to wallet interfaces, which, among other things, fail to speed up transactions. As a reminder, if you specify too low a fee, the transaction can get stuck. In this case, an additional transaction with the same information but a higher base fee should be made, allowing it to go through and at the same time cancelling the previous transfer.

However, most wallets do not yet have this functionality. Vitalik is confident that this expansion of capabilities is necessary. In addition, the latter should be obvious even to those who are new to the cryptocurrency world.


Vitalik mentioned another “weak link” when dealing with digital assets.

Many times there was a surprisingly long delay between the confirmation of the transaction on the blockchain and the confirmation by the recipient of the transfer. On some of these occasions, I was starting to worry that there was some sort of glitch in the payment system on their end.

In addition to the topic of fees, Buterin also mentioned the security of user funds. In 2019, he tested a “social recovery” feature in one of the early cryptocurrency prototypes. This is a special mechanism that allows a lost private key to be recovered by relatively secure methods. One way of doing this is to split the secret combination into five parts, three of which are enough to recover the private key.

Here’s how it works.

• The user has to choose five friends, or so-called “gatekeepers”.
• Let them download the mobile app and provide a confirmation code.
• This combination is used as a security measure when establishing an encrypted connection during key sharing.

But here, too, Vitalik ran into new problems when he needed to recover the private key from his address some time later. Here’s his quote.

I asked my friends to perform the recovery procedure with me through their apps – but things didn’t go as planned. Two of them lost parts of their key because they changed phones and forgot to move the recovery app. A third had an encrypted connection mechanism that didn’t work for a long time, but we managed to solve the problem.

Later, Buterin needed to re-check the whole algorithm, as he again lost access to the wallet. This time, it turned out that updates to the app could erase parts of the key from the user’s “guardians”. All in all, the whole mechanism, while looking promising in theory, has its drawbacks in practice. Well, Vitalik ended up losing a small stock of BTC and ETH as well.

That’s why Vitalik recommends using a mechanism to restore access to cryptocurrency wallets if private keys are lost using smart contracts. Well, it’s safer to use their cryptocurrency wallets as keys, because they are unlikely to lose access to them as easily as they lose parts of certain code.

The bottom line is clear: cryptocurrency wallet and blockchain developers have a lot of different problems to solve that look insignificant at first glance, but are an important barrier to the mass adoption of digital assets. Cryptocurrencies are a convenient means of payment, but the infrastructure for making payments needs to be more reliable and understandable. So developers have assignments not just for the coming months, but for years to come.

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