Can I buy a pizza with it or pay my bills with it? Can my employer pay me in it? Or is it just an “emperor’s new clothes” thing? I just don’t see the tangible value in it. Rhetorical questions, BTW, I know you can’t buy a pizza with it, at least outside of some edge cases that I’m not aware of.
I thought what made money money was everyone agreed it was valuable and was willing to exchange it for goods and services directly. I don’t see that with crypto.
My understanding is this. Let’s say Valve accepted crypto payments. If they did, they wouldn’t need to go through middlemen payment processors like Visa and Mastercard that can use their influence to dictate what games can and can’t be published on Steam.
But yeah the way it works in practice seems to make crypto a commodity, not a currency.
To be fair all it takes is for enough entities to exchange it between other assets. If you are in Europe, most stores won’t sell you anything for your USD unless you exchange it into euros (except some edge cases), so it does feel kinda similar in that sense except cryptos don’t really have a “home” country where they’re universally accepted (bar some nations whose own currency has so throughly failed they adopted it).
There are some services which allow you to spend crypto by simply doing the exchange for you at the point of purchase into whatever currency the store uses (similar to visa/MasterCard/your bank doing this if you pay by card abroad).
I’ll say ultimately though it doesn’t change a lot, the idea of crypto is great and there are some where the implementation actually yields something that could be a better money (truly yours, not controlled by a government or a company necessarily, low fees, near instant transactions), but in the end there are just too many of them and they rock the boat too much for the well established financial institutions that they’re just doomed IMO.
However, the technology itself I expect will end up being used against us by the ruling class in the coming years (i.e crypto currencies controlled by the government where they can set whatever rules they want on it).
Buying hormones for diy hrt
you can buy web hosting or make donations without revealing your identity
Money laundering and gambling mostly
Hide money from government
You can’t carry suitcases of money when you’re fleeing a country, so cryptos it is…
Bitcoin alone uses more electricity than Norway.
And that electricity is mostly from burning coal, so crypto is great for creating global warming
Bitcoin burns so much energy because it’s developers are stubborn. It’s really that simple. Ethereum transitioned to a different algorithm that uses a fraction of that energy and only a few dorks care.
Wait until you hear about the energy cost of traditional finances.
This is a silly thing to say. Normal payment processing uses more energy, but that’s only because there are many, many more payments going through it. It’s orders of magnitude more energy-efficient than crypto.
Bitcoin wastes so much energy, I think all normal payment systems combined use less energy than it.
Bitcoin wastes so much energy because it’s proof of work based which to my understanding is basically a bunch of computers churning out answers competing to be “first and correct” in order to print coins.
I like the idea of decentralized currency but the current execution of cryptocurrency leaves much to be desired.
Perhaps, but it’s no more silly than comparing something’s energy usage to Norway.
Bitcoin in specific doesn’t scale, but other things like Bitcoin Cash scale without increasing the energy usage, because the energy cost of PoW Blockchains comes from their security, not from the scale, so doing 1 or thousands of transactions costs the same.
Plus, things like Ethereum have migrated to PoS which uses very small amount of energy comparable and also scales without increasing energy costs.
It’s good for losing a bunch of money.
It was (briefly) useful for buying and selling illicit substances.
If you were famous it was also good for scamming your audience :3
It still is
I found crypto earlier than some. (not everyone – if I had more I wouldnt have to work anymore, haha!)
IMHO, the main value proposition of crypto is permissionless peer-to-peer payments. If we both have crypto wallets, and you send me an address to make a payment to, I can send that without needing anyone’s approval first. I don’t need any bank to agree to have me as a customer first, or any government to approve why the transaction is taking place. All I need is a functioning payment network, and the original Bitcoin white paper solved how to provide that and preserve anonymity. (Really Pseudo-anonymity, but only the nerds and Monero shills care about the difference)
As an academic experiment regarding permissionless payments, it is a resounding success. But, it turns out, Governments have laws regarding who can pay who, and about scamming people, regardless of the medium. So, just because Bitcoin enables permissionless payments doesn’t mean you can pay whomever you want, or makes scams somehow permissible.
Furthermore, the rapid increase in crypto prices really doomed any chance at all for useful adoption. Because people don’t want to spend crypto anymore. They view it as a Store of Value, and who can blame them, given how it has risen from nothing to a > $2T market cap, even after the recent downturn? You used to be able to use crypto in regular transactions, but not anymore.
So it is digital cash without the backing of a government and no stability.
You mean the same governments that manipulate their currency’s value?
Or in the case of the USA, a government that is spending so much that they’re basically insolvent?
You’re not wrong, but why is not having the backing of a government a bad thing?
Because a currency without a stable backing is completely volatile. Sure the value of normal currencies fluctuate, but apart from a few hyperinflation edge cases that’s at most a few percent each month.
Small cryptocurrencies fluctuate sometimes hundreds of percent each month and even the big coins can swing ±20% every few weeks. The only somewhat stable coins are the ones directly tied to real world currencies.
Having a currency that fluctuates this heavily in value creates the exact same problems as the ever changing US tarrifs did. There simply is no wax to reliably price goods and services for more than a few days. You essentially have to barter each trade.
A currency backed by a government has a very high chance of being able to be used at any time with a mostly stable value. Sure, if the government collapses it can become worthless, but on a worldwide scale that is far, far less likely and you will most likely know if it is headed that way ahead of time.
Governments add a bit of stability for currency used as currency and not as speculation.
Tether is an interesting experiment here. They are traded as smart contract tokens on top of various blockchains. They don’t really have any intrinsic value, other than Tether LTD saying “every Tether is 100% backed by currency reserves”, and releasing unsatisfactory “audits” now and then. It’s main utility is that it provides foreign exchanges with a way to trade in something that is like Dollars without opening them up to the regulation that comes with trading actual dollars. It’s market cap is currently in excess of $180 B.
But, USDT has been around, in one form or another, since 2015. And while other “innovative” crypto products have crashed and burned, Tether has been able to keep its peg and has never failed to meet redemptions. Furthermore, it doesn’t need to be a scam. It’s whole point is to always be worth one currency unit, so all they have to do is invest that currency in safe conventional investments and they can literally make billions of dollars with very little overhead. The most obvious answer is that they are not a scam.
I still don’t really trust them, but I have used them on exchanges, always making sure to trade through Tether to something I can redeem on a US exchange for actual dollars. But, I have to acknowledge they have lasted longer than most crypto entities. I wish they would get a complete audit together, but at some point their reputation for having lasted so long needs to be worth something?
Madoff’s scheme lasted for 30 years or more, surely that means it’s worth something?
He managed to keep it up until all of a sudden he couldn’t. Madoff was undone when he had to produce 440 million that he didn’t have.
Meanwhile, Tether was able to meet billions on withdrawals, several times. After Terra collapsed, I seem to recall they saw $15B in redemptions, but I can’t find any reputable links on that. If Tether was a scam, shouldn’t it have failed a long time ago?
People outside of crypto don’t realize how massive Tether is, and how much money it has under management. As much as the crypto bros dislike Central Banks, Tether has turned into one. If Tether were to ever implode, it would take most Crypto businesses with it.
There’s a bunch of different cryptocurrencies and a bunch of different government-backed fiat currencies, all with different ranges of stability. Even stuff like gold isn’t actually “stable”, the price varies. Pick whichever range of stability suits your needs. You could use a stabletoken that’s pegged to something else - US dollars are popular.
I was on a forum in 2009-2010 when another member posted asking whether they should get into bitcoin. I found a video pitching it, can’t remember if the poster linked it or I googled bitcoin after reading their post. I said it sounded sketchy and advised against it.
To be fair there’s a lot of crypto currency that was/still is a scam. Also I’d argue that BTC, and crypto in general, still is being treated as a security that’s backed by thin air. Ie: it’s a speculative asset that doesn’t actually have any value.
There’s nothing really stopping BTC from crashing hard. It’s so wild to me how people treat it.
I could have bought bitcoin too when it was worth pennies but there was no way to know which crypto the whales were going to bet on for the pump and dump. It’s a missed opportunity but rest assured there’s plenty of universes where Bitcoin amounted to nothing.
Oh I’m not losing sleep over it. It’s basically gambling anyway.
And BTC went from approximately zero to approximately $100K over that time. What else are you advising against at this time? To be honest, I had read an article on cryptocurrency somewhere around '09, and thought, “wow, this is where currency is headed!” I asked a friend who was a nerdy computer programmer type, and he said it was like tulip mania in The Netherlands, so I didn’t invest. Sigh.
From Investopedia: (https://www.investopedia.com/what-can-you-buy-with-bitcoin-5179592) - since I don’t know everything, and nobody else has said this…
*Bitcoin launched in 2009, enabling transactions via crypto debit cards linked to Mastercard and Visa
*Bitcoin can purchase products like electronics, luxury watches, and cars.
*The SEC approved the first U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024.
*PayPal lets users buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrency in their accounts.
*Cryptocurrency debit cards offer an easy way to use Bitcoin for purchases.
he said it was like tulip mania in The Netherlands
He’s not wrong.
It’s great for sending money abroad. No bank, minimal fees. I use it for that all the time, to send friends gifts for weddings and birthdays and stuff.
Yes, this requires everyone in the transaction to be on the network and know how to sell cryptocurrency; the question is whether it’s useful, not whether it’s useful with no caveats 😋
It’s great for being paid while working abroad.
It si great for taking sucker’s money.
Cryptocurrency is a decentralized digital currency, it can be used for the same thing as any other digital currency, the difference being that you can use it without relying on a centralized authority like a bank or similar financial institutions.
Yes you can buy pizzas with it, although that’s less common nowadays because there are more practical ways to pay for that and you probably don’t mind the bank and government to know you buy pizzas.
I thought what made money money was everyone agreed it was valuable and was willing to exchange it for goods and services directly. I don’t see that with crypto.
You don’t? If I were to offer you 1BTC for your mouse, would you accept it? If you say no you’re stupid, if you say yes you confirmed you see it as valuable and are willing to exchange it for goods directly.
Sure! you can buy lots o things with it, if going through gift cards is ok for you. websites like coinsbee or bitrefill allows you to buy:
- videogames (steam, keyshops etc)
- fuel
- traveling (trains, airplanes)
- food (various supermarkets)
- clothes
and more. I personally tried only videogames and amazon but it worked for me. i have a gift card for IKEA but still need to test it.
Also you don’t need to give data aside from a mail so it’s pretty private
