So I just tried to buy some weed.

This is a fun process, the prices are in US$, my currency is £, but I need to fund in butts.

So I have to find the cost of the weed plus the cost of the shipping, in $, convert it to butts, and then buy enough butts, using pounds.

So I log on buttbargain to do so. My weed site says that a butt is worth £994, Google tells me £1004, but buttbargain sellers want £1072. That's like 8% extra, but whatever.

So I send some guy some money by bank transfer. It's not a lot of money (like £25) and there's no real incentive to rip me off. That goes ok. So now I have 0.02057854342432 butts (the decimal places are super important, even though it's totally fucking confusing how many of them are actually significant).

So all i need to do now is send my butts to the drugz 'n' gunz 'n' murder 'n' fraud wonderland, and then maybe I will get my drugs, but wait I have a decision.

"How much of a fee do you want to pay?"

Wait, there's a fee? I thought I already paid like 8%. Ok, Let's see 0 "your transaction may take literally WEEKS", £0.13, £0.26 or £0.50 (FASTEST, RECOMMENDED).

Well fuck. £0.50 on £25 is a lot. I mean a typical debit card charge (for the vendor) here is like 10p: http://www.cardswitcher.co.uk/2016/05/warning-more-visa-debit-fee-changes-2016/ And if Visa and the banks can make billions of dollars in profits on that, well I'm sure 13p is plenty to send my measly £25.

Ok, so I choose the 13p and click 'send'. Now I have to keep reloading the page until they actually send the money. This takes like 4.5 minutes, which is longer than it took me to send money to a human being, me to approve the transaction via my phone, him to verify that he'd receive it, and then allocate the butts to me on the buttbargain website.

So now I can view the buttchain.

Inputs: 0.5 BTC Fee: 0.00054312 BTC

Wait what???? I paid 0.5% of the value of my butts as an 'expediting' fee so they don't take 'literally weeks' to send my money, but my transaction has been merged with a bunch of others who have presumably paid fuck all, as the overall transaction fee is just 0.1%. What kinda bullshit is that? And why the fuck can I send actual money across the world instantly but butts take longer AND cost more?

Now it's the middle of the night and I have to decide do I (a) go to sleep and check my butts tomorrow (but by then it might be too late for my drugs or (b) wait - but who knows how long this shit will take. And oh yeah, let's hope my butts are not short of the amount I need to pay for my drugs by the time they actually arrive.