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.
Why are you asking a question when you clearly made up you mind already? :)
You are wrong of course, you can buy anything with crypto as long as the other person accepts crypto (there are dozens of marketplaces, not only darknet ones, e.g. xmrbazaar).
My instance hosting is paid for in Monero. I plan to change it soon to another hosting, which also accepts Monero. The domain is also paid for in Monero. Same for my VPN (Mullvad actually offers 10% off when you pay in crypto!). I regularly donate to projects such as GrapheneOS, Qubes, Whonix, TOR using Monero. I donate Monero to support people hosting things I use, e.g. invidious instances. Your employer absolutely can pay you in crypto if they choose to, and there are examples of people who do receive their salary in crypto. You could easily find examples/articles about that if you wanted to.
No, money is not defined by “everyone agreeing that it is valuable and willing to exchange it for goods and services”. Do you think Zimbabwean dollar (or any other foreign currency other than a few most popular ones) is valuable? Would you agree to sell me your goods and services for it? Why not? Right, because it is not the currency YOU use. Other people use it, so it is money for them. Same with crypto. People use it as trustless p2p money whether you like it or not.If you need to hate crypto so much please get back to arguments such as “oh no it uses a lot of energy and allows people to
freely exchange it for goods and servicesbuy drugs on the internet”, at least those are correct. Please also subscribe to r/buttcoin if you use reddit.r/buttcoin
hehe… “butt”
It’s good for losing a bunch of money.
Kind of like fiat currency
bold of you to assume that anyone outside of the Epstine class is holding enough cash for that to matter
It was (briefly) useful for buying and selling illicit substances.
It still is
briefly
Yeah, that went away and has never happened again since.
If you were famous it was also good for scamming your audience :3
Nope
Money laundering and gambling mostly
Buying hormones for diy hrt
It’s useful for sending money internationally in situations that would be otherwise difficult
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.
Fun fact: steam accepted bitcoin until a couple years ago
Yupp and then recently had to deal with Visa and MasterCard swinging their dick around and forcing them into submission with what they could and could not have that was legal in their own store.
There is a fee for crypto transaction processing. The fee is the same irrespective of dollar value, so for small transactions, like buying a game, it is more than a cc middleman fee.
Eventually, I think k this is where crypto can work. Something like the digital euro where the transactions are processed by a trusted entity, the European central bank, rather than your local bank through the visa or MasterCard system. If those fees can be low or eliminated, visa and MasterCard are dead.
you can buy web hosting or make donations without revealing your identity
Sometimes it’s expensive or difficult to send money between two countries, depending on which countries they are. But if you know how to send crypto, it’s the same process and price no matter where it’s going.
Is a question still rhetorical if you’re wrong? Because you absolutely can buy a pizza and pay bills with it, you’ve been able to for years. You can also get paid in it, you’ve been able to for years.
Just because you choose not to, doesn’t mean you can’t.
Crime, mostly.
I’ve bought some online services with it.
It’s a technology that allows you to verifiably possess a definite quantity of “a thing.” That thing is just virtual.
Think of it this way: shares in companies are also virtual things. You can’t build a bridge out of em.
But a stock exchange is there to sell them to you and they will keep track that yes, you do actually own X shares of company Y.
Instead of issuing shares on a stock exchange to raise money, a new company could just sell shares of itself by creating a new crypto. There would be a finite number of “coins” representing ownership shares. The company could control whether more can be created. And it would be verifiable who owns what.
So that verifying and quantity-control are both features of the software itself. You could say it’s good for those things. As I illustrated above, this could be used to virtualize ownership of something, including the buying and selling of shares of it.
These are the types of examples used, but I don’t not think it is actually good for these uses. If your account is hacked and someone takes the crypto, there is no way to reverse the transaction, now what the hackers own your company? If you can invalidate the shares and reissue new ones, then owning the crypto is not actually ownership of the company.
Even without theft what do you do when people simply lose access to their wallets. Maybe because they forget their password or they die and they never gave their heirs the information.
That’s all true. There are also risks with other forms of currency though. Cash is entirely vulnerable to theft (and destruction, and you can even lose it eg: forgetting where you hid it, just like forgetting a password). And other accounts can be hacked and stolen from as well, not always in any traceable way, else there would be no bank fraud or credit card theft. Nothing’s perfect.
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).
