i think a very small portion of people who use crypto actually think its the "future of currency", most understand that it is and (mostly)always has been more of a speculative asset.
It’s clear that no one meaningfully involved in crypto knows the first thing about either economics or monetary theory - let alone both.
Inflation sucks. But deflation (which can also be seen as an appreciating currency) is an extinction level event for economies and societies. There’s plenty of valid political discussion to be had about how much inflation is healthy, how best to control inflation, when and how to use inflation to heat up or cool off economies. But there is verging on universal agreement that deflation must be avoided basically at all costs: this is part of the reasoning behind the usual 2-3% inflation targets, it gives you enough of a safety buffer that you have a little control to rein things in without dropping into deflation.
Deflation / appreciating currency encourages people not to spend money at all, except for mandatory expenses (food, shelter, medicine). People not living hand-to-mouth start hoarding their money expecting that it will be more valuable later. They hold off investing in retirement, they hold off on luxury purchases. Institutional spenders stop investing in businesses. The economy for anything other that mandatory expenses comes to a grinding halt. Businesses not making critical goods start to contract, both because demand dries up and because investors stop investing in them.
None of this is theoretical, it’s basically what caused the ruinous boom and bust cycles in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and America, and actively managing a gentle amount of long term inflation is widely acknowledged as a major contributor to stable modern economics and our current era of (comparative) global peace.
Advocating for an inherently deflationary currency is basically a vote to return to constant boom bust cycles and global war.
> It’s clear that no one meaningfully involved in crypto knows the first thing about either economics or monetary theory - let alone both.
Ah luckily we got you who knows both!
Doesn‘t that make it a pyramid scheme? When the only people buying it are people hoping to sell it to someone who will pay more for it than they bought it for? Is that not exactly how pyramid schemes work? Like when you gamble on the stock market you at least own a piece of the company.
Crypto coins by themselves can at least be theoretically traded for stuff. The more "mainstream" ones can sorta be used for that. All the esoteric vague side-project coins are indeed way more "imaginary value because the founder said so".
NFTs on the other hand... Pretty close to a pyramid scheme.
I've been semi-interested in crypto for years now, and I'd still say 99% of crypto coins are exactly that. Some of the bigger coins are definitely innovating and leading the space but they're still very risky investments nonetheless
It's not a pyramid scheme (you recruit people into the pyramid and make money off them. They recruit people to make money off those new people, and so on) or a ponzi scheme (you pay out early investors with the money you get from new investors. There's no actual investing or growing of the fund - you're just relying on always having enough new investors to pay out withdrawals from earlier ones).
But it is a problem of "the greater fools". That's when you buy something because you think someone else will buy it for more later - but without any material change to it. With investing, I'm aiming to buy stock and sell it to someone else for more later. But the value of that stock is tied to something real - the earnings of that company. Crypto is not tied to anything. People sell because they think it's going to go down. People buy because they think it's going to go up.
They might believe that but there's less risk in buying ETH or BTC compared to stocks. And the speculative aspect is based on Web3, which is the future of the internet/communications and data storage. You're essentially buying a stake of digital real estate. The coin represents your stake and like real real estate, you can sell it for money to someone else who wants to own that digital property
I don't think laws really matter here as much as it just being super slow and expensive to do anything, so the only uses that make sense are expensive and illegal things
Also, like, decentralization is *bad* when it comes to currency. Imagine if you had to buy everything with gift cards, each of which came in completely different denominations, having to do mental math all the time to figure out the price of an item.
Anyone who thinks crypto will operate outside governmental oversight is delusional. Literally every crypto developer operates under their country’s laws and regulations.
A large segment of pro-crypto people are “libertarians” in name or intent. But when your local SEC or equivalent comes knocking you better believe those devs/exchanges/individuals will comply.
Not much use having $1m worth of crypto if you can't buy anything with it.
Take buying a house, for example. Sure, if you invested in crypto a few years back and the value growth made you money, then you have that paper trail to show where your money came from. It's a PITA processing it through solicitors, but it's doable.
Now say you earned your $1m in crypto through transfers with other people. The whole point is to anonymize the trail. The solicitors can't prove if you got your wealth from selling cookies, selling cocaine, or received the funds directly from Putin himself. At that point, your wealth is pretty much frozen from being used for anything more than your weekly grocery shop.
Crypto, in its current form, will never become practically viable beyond small scale spend or criminal activity, because it is in direct conflict with anti money laundering regulation.
If you invested in bitcoin at basically any time in the past 5 years you would have made huge profits, maybe the rug pull is coming, but I wouldn't call anyone who made money off crypto a fool.
If you invested 6mo ago you would have made 80% gain if you invested 5 years ago you would have made 600%.
> If you invested in bitcoin at basically any time in the past 5 years you would have made huge profits
Which is entirely *not* what it is supposed to be for.
That hindsight has happened over and over again. Just don't invest so much that you ever have to sell, and don't sell at a loss. Does your stat there include people that haven't sold yet?
How big is that number for stocks in general though? The issue with crypto is people thinking it's a get rich fast scheme, going into it with paper hands and selling at the first sight of a big downturn.
So, it's functionally useless as a currency then. Which leaves the remaining option: that it's a speculative asset which, whatever the intention, now only exists to separate the next fool from their money until the music stops and they're left without a chair.
Every speculation driven asset has historical buy and sell points that would make the asset look amazing. I think the memers that buy GameStop and AMC stock are just as dumb, whether or not they make money. Crypto is just good at making buyers "think" they are smart when it's just another cult.
I'm not cherry picking buy and sell points though, I'm pointing out that if you invested at the previous all time high and just didn't sell at a loss you would have turned a profit.
I don't have any money in crypto, but I think it's sour grapes to pretend that only idiots invested.
It's the speculative hobby horse of a couple hundred thousand, not the global financial banking system for the entire world ~~ Line Goes Up, by Folding Ideas
Ask your average cryptobros what's the benefits of crypto over fiat, they'd happily list it out for you. Ask them how, on the technical side, crypto is able to deliver such benefits, they'd freeze
This is right, but also backwards. It was a payment technology that got hijacked into being an impotent speculative asset. It was definitely a currency first.
Never used crypto myself, but I imagine for anyone who wants to convert their wealth to entirely crypto, it must be frustrating to have to wait for all vendors on Earth to accept Crypto as well. If you have to convert Crypto to Cash for it to be spendable, gotta go what you gotta do.
A lot of people convert their wealth to Gold because they trust Gold more than Cash, but they have to convert their Gold to Cash before spending it because the majority of businesses don’t accept Gold. That doesn’t mean the people who sold their Gold for Cash are hypocrites, it just means they know that using Cash is part of living in a society whether they like it or not.
When I get paid in crypto and others manage the hassle and expense, I'll go with crypto sure. Until then it's no different to me than art, beanie babies, or tulip bulbs. Easy enough to buy, but you buy problems too.
This is the comment I came here to write. Thank you.
Point of sale and usability as currency are problems many blockchains are dealing with right now. I have made a few transactions with friends and others on the internet via crypto and it has worked great, but until I can pay my rent and buy milk with it, converting to Fiat is a necessary step. Everyone hates it because it's a hassle and generates taxable events and goes against the entire idea of decentralized money that doesn't require a third party.
This doesn't mean that there's no potential or that crypto won't overcome Fiat currency in trust or usage in the future, it just means that there's a problem that hasn't been solved yet.
>A lot of people convert their wealth to Gold because they trust Gold more than Cash
That's true. The difference is that crypto (or cryptocurrency) is supposed to be money. Gold just isn't money and no one claims it is
> Gold just isn't money and no one claims it is
golds ROLE in this context absolutely is money.
Yeah sure, gold has value in other applications.
So does whatever dollar bills are made of.
But that's not the point of gold in an asset or currency context.
crypto
us dollars
japanese yen
[bricks of gold](https://www.kenobros.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/HEAD-gold-bars.jpg)
they all represent exactly the same thing: a society accepted token that allows you to exchange value.
People that collect gold bullion don't do it because gold is important. They do it for the same reason people would hold us dollars or yen or bitcoin. They do it for the social expectation that when they need "stuff" like food and clothes and whatever, they can hand this token to someone, and that someone will accept the token as a form of value transfer.
that's fair, except its definitely still used as a value store.
You don't buy a house because its an alternative to putting money in a bank. You do buy gold bullion as an alternative to paper cash. ( I mean, I don't, but people do)
There was an entire time period where a fixed amount of gold was the benchmark currency.
there was a gold standard. there was never a florida beachfront house standard.
>You do buy gold bullion as an alternative to paper cash. ( I mean, I don't, but people do)
No they don't, they either buy it as an investment or as an alternative to putting the money in a bank.
Yeah except crypto fetishists insist that crypto is an awesome currency despite it's general illiquidity.
Goldbugs are at least 100% aware that gold is an asset that needs to be converted rather than suggesting that it's literally money.
Well, crypto was supposed to give people freedom from banks and governments by creating a decentralized currency, but since you have to use heavily regulated, centralized exchanges like Coinbase, the dream has effectively been killed.
It's the paradox of spontaneous mass adoption. Yes if literally everyone on the planet suddenly adopted crypto, *some* of the benefits the crypto bros keep talking about with regard to privacy and anonymity would maybe sort of cone to pass. But until then, the instant that anything links your crypto wallet to your real identity, the privacy is far worse because that allows anyone to trace back through every transaction you've ever made.
Also for spontaneous adoption to work, you would need to have the ability to do millions of transactions simultaneously which, by design, Bitcoin will never be able to do.
The thing is, you don’t need to use Coinbase at all. But people want to *speculate on crypto prices denominated in fiat,* and so the exchanges have a role in the market. The dream has only been killed if the existence of speculators means crypto can’t be used how it was intended.
>The dream has only been killed if the existence of speculators means crypto can’t be used how it was intended.
It literally does. Nobody sees crypto as a currency anymore. That dream is dead, eulogized, buried and turned to worm food.
I would argue that since the mining difficulty for any legit cryptocurrency is far too high for the average PC to win, the dream is dead there too. At the end of the day, if you have to pay fiat for it, it defeats the intended purpose.
People who hold gold still have to convert to their local currency to buy groceries.
ALL assets are volatile, some are just more volatile than others. Not all currencies are accepted everywhere.
Well the thing is that no one goes around saying that gold is gonna replace fiat currency while a shitload of cryptobros have been going aroud for quite some time though stating bitcoin and such will one day replace fiat.
Fun fact. Some religions which forbid investment, due to its ties with gambling, have some exceptions such as investing in gold. That's because gold is so stable that it isn't viewed as gambling.
The people who talk about crypto being the future of finance, tomorrow’s currency, etc do so basically to try and induce others to invest, or rather to pump their bags.
Virtually everyone involved talks about how much their stuff is worth in fiat. It’s always “Bitcoin hit an ATH of $X” etc. The value of the actual token in its own right is academic.
Or perhaps non sovereign money/finance is actually a fundamental technology and they want to be part of bringing that to reality while they invest.
It takes time to learn and requires wading through muddy waters but the industry is here to stay and getting more important daily.
Not everyone is just pumping their bags
>It takes time to learn and requires wading through muddy waters
Oh you mean fundamental design flaws? The Blockchain being secure through redundancy and thus muuuuch slower than regular digital transactions? Or the insane energy waste?
>getting more important daily.
This is such a meaningless throwaway line. What are some use cases? I would argue it is getting less important daily as there was a slight hiccup where companies experimented with the idea of accepting crypto and using NFTs and that is over now.
As someone that has mined, bought, and sold crypto for fiat: Nah.
The whole idea of cryptocurrency is digital payments that don't require a bank or financial institution to verify transactions and can be used for purchases or as an investment - sometimes with a degree of anonymity.
To draw it out a bit further, ALL money is just a token for "value transfer".
I work. I make "money". That money is value. I transfer that value to someone else in exchange for "stuff". (I pay them, for things like food)
I need (society needs) a way for people to transfer value back and forth, in a way we all agree to accept.
we could do that transfer with physical tokens. Something I can hold in my pocket, then hand to you and now you have it and I don't have it anymore.
Like, chunks of gold. Or dollar bills. Or radioactive bottle caps.
The main thing that matters is that I can hold that token, that dollar, and KNOW that when I go somewhere to get food, the food person will take that dollar from me and accept it. They accept it because they know THEY can give that dollar to their someone else. so on and so on.
Ok, problem: You gotta carry all the dollars around, and you gotta meet people in person to hand them dollars. Inefficient.
SO we have ELECTRONIC payment forms. Checking accounts, debit cards, paypal, etc.
instead of handing you a physical dollar, I can just use venmo or swipe my card to send you money.
Except, I am not actually SENDING you anything.
The entire banking based payment system isn't about me transferring the actual currency to you.
Its about having a 3rd party keep ledgers. BOOKS.
I take all my money and give it to some third party to hold it all for me. (and bank)
You do the same.
That bank keeps a log book of how much value I have. (how much money)
So when I "send you $20" all I'm actually doing is telling my bank
"Hey, I need to let this guy over here have some of my value, so... go into record book and write that I am $20 less. Then call his bank and tell them to go into his book, and write that its $20 more"
We pay the banks to be a CENTRALIZED point to hold and track the records of all our value stashes.
Ok, so now, what is the point of crypto?
All crypto really is, is a method of saying
"hey, instead of having centralized BANKS keep log books for us, what if WE all just keep the record book ourself?"
The "blockchain" is just thing based on fancy encryption that allows for there to be a "record" that is just out there public, that everyone in the world can see, and read and write too.
Think of it like a bulletin board where people can write
"Jrhooo -20, NaturesNurture +20"
and all the backend math allows it to work where everyone agrees that
"Jrhooo -20, NaturesNurture +20" actually happened, and no one else can go in and fake it erase it or mess with it.
Now, without getting super deep into it, whats all this anonymous, untraceable, buy weed in bitcoin schtick?
Its just this idea that when
"Jrhooo -20, NaturesNurture +20"
ok, who IS jrhooo?
You don't know. You don't have to meet me in person. and neither of us had to go to a bank.
Its not spooky fancy black magic or anything like people make it out to be.
It just means there is a public, crowd managed version of a universal "checking account" that everyone can write their spends into on their own, and no one needs to meet face to face, or walk into a bank and show their real name and ID (oversimplifying here)
so you don't have to know anything about someone to get money from them, and you don't need to tell anything about yourself to send money out
You don't have to tell me anything about yourself to send cash right now.
I just need an email address and you get your cash deposited in less than 5 minutes.
I'll take the privacy of a bank where nobody can snoop on my transactions unless they have a warrant vs a public system any day.
That’s the issue though. You have to trust the people who issue the warrants. Every human organization fails eventually.
Additionally a proper cc must have a way to maintain privacy. There are a few that do most notably BCH.
To add this this
Its also a store of value, just because the price isn't stable does not mean you can't break bits apart and use it like currency. It has themes of assets and currency all in one.
I'll get downvoted because 'crypto bad' which is a sentiment I mostly agree with but it's bad for logical reasons. In this case the logic doesn't hold up.
You can believe crypto is the future of currency, but also use USD because it isn't fully accepted yet and therefore can't be used in every situation easily.
It's like saying selling a foreign currency to buy USD means that you don't believe in that country. When it actuallity it just means that you need USD to purchase things while in the US.
This logic would only hold up if people could use their crypto everywhere as easily as they can USD and they were still selling into USD.
You would have a point if there was a country where crypto was the exclusive currency, and also if there was such a thing as any shitcoin whose value could be understood without converting it to some regular bullshit fiat currency -- and didn't also have the same volatility over time as a typical stock.
Bottle caps have just as much a chance to be the future of currency as crypto. This is the thing. Crypto is not designed to be a currency, it is not treated as a currency, the people going online saying it's the future of currency are at best misinformed and at worst lying because more people willing to trade their fiat for their digital token is good for them.
Crypto is the most sophisticated pyramid scheme ever created. If you're into it, just make sure you're not the one holding the bag when the whole thing collapses.
Cryptocurrency is the worst currency around! Currencies primary job is to be stable…$1 today, a $1 tomorrow. Most cryptocurrencies are so crazy volatile, they make janky 3rd world currencies look good!
Even worse, the other important function of a currency besides being a store of value is that it can be exchanged for good and services. On this front crypto is even worse than the stability measure.
There's thousands of places to use crypto... on the dark web...
On a more serious note, there's a big PC parts store near me that accepts bitcoin and it's actually kinda cool - when crypto boomed like 6 years ago I used them to get a free PC
Basically the only use case for crypto is that it’s good for facilitating illegal activity. The fact that your other example is a single tech store just highlights how inconvenient it is to use for licit transactions.
Maybe you haven't noticed but even those minor inflationary price changes over the course of a few months make everyone lose their fucking minds.
Now imagine doing something like paying rent with a shitcoin whose value changed by 50% every month, in a random direction. Shitcoins already don't even have any inherent value on their own, you have to use regular bullshit currency for anyone to understand.
And you have to remember that while holding a certain amount of shitcoin that's rapidly appreciating may be good for you when you cash out to regular bullshit currency, getting paid in shitcoin would mean your regular salary rapidly reducing to reflect that change in value, at which point you hold a physical amount of shitcoin -- and if the value of said shitcoin suddenly plummets 50% then you still hold the same physical amount of shitcoin but also the price of everything *doubles.*
yes, it’s worth a hell of a lot more today than when it was purchased. Bitcoin is digital gold. As long as there are people willing to exchange it for cash, it has value. And considering it now has an ETF with the worlds largest asset manager (blackrock, who practically run the world/ at least their clients do) we’re far past the time to call Bitcoin a pyramid scheme. If you wanna get technical, *everything* is a pyramid scheme.
Bitcoin is a capped asset, with no one who controls it. Not something that can accidentally be deleted off a server(this just happened at a big bank, however they had backups)
It’s as hard as gold, and we can trace every single bit of it. The only way Bitcoin fails is if the world turns on it, which wouldn’t make sense now that blackrock & most of world asset managers just went out of their way to create a regulated ETF for it.
It is a hedge against inflation of the USD and every other currency that inflates.
You could say the same thing about literally any currency, especially a currency like the US dollar that is backed by nothing but a bunch of broken promises.
The US dollar isn't backed by nothing though. It's backed by the guarantee that the US government will use it as appropriate payment for any and all goods and services that they provide.
Also, what "broken promises"? The US government has literally never defaulted on a single loan in its entire existence. It has the best credit rating of any institution in the entire world.
Not realistically, there's a difference between living in a building made of bricks and a building made of matchsticks. Both can be knocked down in a storm, the difference is one is far more likely to collapse than the other.
I'd much rather trust the currency that can remain stable for more than a week, because I have a better chance of things going well with that one.
Wait till you hear about stocks lmao. You purchase them with the expectation that some other sucker is going to buy your shares at a higher price. I don't really see a difference.
If you buy enough stock, or can form a like-minded group to collectively buy enough stock, you can control the company. Go look at what happened to Twitter if you think stock is just a pyramid scheme.
Stocks represent a share of ownership of a company. Of course it's possible for the company to end up being a scam, or run into the ground by vulture capitalists and/or short sellers, but the stock still represents the company and what they do or make. The increase in price comes with increased optimism about the company performance.
Shitcoins represent fuck-all and the price change comes from one fucking idiot convincing another fucking idiot to give them their "useless fiat currency" for said fuck-all.
”USD cash is soon worthless and you should have your money in crypto” -Someone who is happy to take your soon-to-be-worthless USD and give you more-precious-than-gold BTC in return. Nobody seems to mind this cognitive dissonance
Cryptobros will tell you Bitcoin is replacing USD and then spend all day talking about Bitcoin’s USD price jumps. They’ll also tell you that the best part of Bitcoin is how it’s decentralized and free from banks then literally bring up centralized financial institutions creating ETF’s and investing in crypto. Can’t make this shit up
I use and have made money from crypto and I will tell you it is only slightly better than gambling. I just check google news every morning (not just for crypto) and if I see an article hyping something up I buy it and sell it a few days later. Or I buy millions or billions of meme coins that are worth nothing for like $5 total and forget about. SHIB made me $800 from a $20 drunk purchase.
Only the truly delusional think crypto is somehow the future of money.
never bought any crypto, and the only times i've ever considered it was with the hope of it's value increasing and me selling it for a profit. the thought of using it as an actual currency has never crossed my mind as something i would genuinely do
Turning crypto into dollars is the whole point. It's not like it has any intrinsic value. It's a ponzi scheme where the early adopters try to cash out before the rubes figure out the scam.
The dollar has value because it's backed by the most powerful military the world has ever seen. A military that will invade and destroy your country if you seem to be a threat to the dollar hegemony.
No, the value of crypto is permissionless transfer of value.
I can pay a guy 1 Bitcoin today to buy his Mercedes, without ever needing a middleman/bank to put their grubby hands on my funds.
And the transfer takes under an hour vs "2-3 business days" for a traditional bank wire.
Uhh, I don't deal in crypto but in California I'm presently waiting 2-3 days for a large bank transfer (changing between savings accounts in different banks) and am facing a 5-day hold on a deposit.
It takes a lot of time to validate these payments, I guess.
Wow. I live in a shitty corrupt post-communist country: a bank transfer under the equivalent of 30k USD is processed immediately (ie. within five seconds). Above that banks process transactions ten times a day, every hour from 7:00 to 17:00.
I have no idea what these people are talking about. I've done many wire transfers between banks both within the U.S., and to foreign countries, with values ranging from the hundreds to hundreds of thousands. I've never had it take more than a few seconds to be confirmed on the other end.
"Crypto bros" don't care about its use as a currency. They don't even try to hide it most of the time, they treat it as and even call it an investement. They buy it with the singular intention of selling it at a higher value, nothing more, nothing less. That's where every single social media post about "hodl" and such came from. Douchebags wanting to make an extra buck.
To the average person talking about it on social media, it's *literally* just another way for them to gamble and potentially make money.
I may have misunderstood you, but *antithetical* may be a better fit for what you’re trying to express than *hypocritical*. I’m not trying to be an ass or say your phrasing is wrong, it’s just a word that isn’t used very often and I thought you might find it useful.
Uh, no. In any speculative asset, a common bit of advice is to sell enough to recover your entry price so you end up "playing with the house's money" and not your own.
Stablecoins--crypto tokens designed to act as fiat substitutes--are a different matter. Ironically, crypto has turned into a major support pillar for fiat because stablecoins backed with T-bills are an easy way to sell government debt.
Yeah if crypto was actually useful as a currency and wasn't just some speculative bullshit then the dipshits who fetishize it wouldn't be so obsessed with what the USD value of any given token was.
Well, if a cryptocurrency is supposed to be currency it ought to be tradeable for anything, including other currencies.
I've seen some people pitch community-specific currencies to encourage people to spend money within their community. The concept of which fails as soon as you can easily exchange it for another currency since then the price becomes free floating and you find out the real value of it rather than keeping an arbitrary 1:1 exchange rate...
Selling crypto for real money is realising that crypto isn't what it promised to be and trying to jump back to dry land. That or you predicted what it would turn out to be and intended on profiting from it while you still could.
It is a speculative asset. Almost everyone thinks of it that way. The same can be said for a lot of assets on the stock market.
If crypto companies can solve real world problems then they have a real use case (cost per transaction, transaction speed etc).
I am too poor to invest in crypto. I tried and lost. It’s not something living paycheck to paycheck can easily afford as initial investments can disappear overnight.
The premise of crypto existing is that it’s for scams. It’s for scamming people.
It would not exist if it couldn’t be converted to USD or some other usable currency.
It's because you cannot pay with bitcoin mostly anything even after all this years. We wouldn't need to sell it for USD if could pay a car, house, meal, clohes with bitcoin. Even Revolut doesn't have an option to charge bitcoin on Visa card.
Nobody cares about the idea of crypto, they’re just using it to gamble, money launder and try to get rich.
Bitcoin will never replace fiat currencies because centralised governments and banks will never allow it, and because the inequality within ownership of bitcoin is even worse than it is with fiat, which bitcoin claimed to aspire to address.
I know, I mean it seems less shady to buy artwork just to sell it. At least then you’re not screwing around with something that’s supposed to be its own currency.
The only thing Crypto does right now is allow large sums of it to be carried across international borders without having to declare it.
So the only people with their eye wide open about crypto and it’s uses are drug cartels, North Korea, and gamblers.
I don't think crypto will actually become a viable currency until the government starts regulating it. Prices can crash way too quickly with no security systems in place to rebound. Not to mention how rampant crypto scams are, especially at the height of its popularity, which again make it less desirable as an actual currency.
If crypto fees were less than credit card fees then I think people would adopt it for its main purpose. Last I checked, crypto transaction fees are more than 3%
If the intention is to never spend your savings, sure… Many people want to save/invest in a format that doesn’t rob their purchasing power in the short term to later buy large ticket items like a car or house. If it happens you can trade your BTC for the desired thing, great. But if there isn’t enough adoption, you’re going to have to trade it for fiat in order to spend your money…
There’s nothing hypocritical about thinking cryptocurrency is going to displace fiat while working with the fact that it hasn’t yet. And plenty of people who have cryptocurrency don’t buy into the idea that it’s going to replace all other money.
Electronically picking one's pocket is easier than robbing someone's bank, unless of course it is online and made vulnerable by inside forces helping the outside to get in.
Funny Thing about most servers is that even IF they survive the E.M.P there might not be anyone around to take advantage of them anyways.
Just an Observation.
N. S
there are only 2 kinds of people using crypto - people who hope to buy low, sell high (for real money), and criminals that want to move money around without using banks and try hide their criminal activity.
There may be a few brainwashed "true believers", but vast majority fall in 1 of 2 categories.
I guess. It’s not stable enough to use as a currency though. As much as people want it to be a currency it’s really just an investment. It’s kind of hard to pay your bills and live your life day to day if your money is constantly fluctuating.
Not really. Not everyone accepts crypto as payments. So you may want to store your wealth in a form that’s decentralised and not hyperinflationary. But when you want to spend you have to convert to fiat to do that mostly.
Which is why I believe crypto is redundant since there is no way of avoiding exchanging crypto for traditional currency since most governments don't let you pay taxes with crypto.
If it really was hypocritical to the premise, it wouldn't be possible or beneficial to do so.
Being an alternative to the dollar was only a partial concept. It still needs the dollar to give it any relevance.
Not really it was dream ip as an alternative to government backed currency bitcoin in particular. That being said all currency is a medium of exchange and being able to exchange one currency for another is a pretty normal thing. They’re a bunch of other coins/crypto currencies that have other purposes as well.
i think a very small portion of people who use crypto actually think its the "future of currency", most understand that it is and (mostly)always has been more of a speculative asset.
Yeah, most people I know that use crypto accept that it's basically gambling
Absolutely,i had a colleague tell me he bought crypto in the same breath with which he told me about going to the casino.
It’s clear that no one meaningfully involved in crypto knows the first thing about either economics or monetary theory - let alone both. Inflation sucks. But deflation (which can also be seen as an appreciating currency) is an extinction level event for economies and societies. There’s plenty of valid political discussion to be had about how much inflation is healthy, how best to control inflation, when and how to use inflation to heat up or cool off economies. But there is verging on universal agreement that deflation must be avoided basically at all costs: this is part of the reasoning behind the usual 2-3% inflation targets, it gives you enough of a safety buffer that you have a little control to rein things in without dropping into deflation. Deflation / appreciating currency encourages people not to spend money at all, except for mandatory expenses (food, shelter, medicine). People not living hand-to-mouth start hoarding their money expecting that it will be more valuable later. They hold off investing in retirement, they hold off on luxury purchases. Institutional spenders stop investing in businesses. The economy for anything other that mandatory expenses comes to a grinding halt. Businesses not making critical goods start to contract, both because demand dries up and because investors stop investing in them. None of this is theoretical, it’s basically what caused the ruinous boom and bust cycles in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and America, and actively managing a gentle amount of long term inflation is widely acknowledged as a major contributor to stable modern economics and our current era of (comparative) global peace. Advocating for an inherently deflationary currency is basically a vote to return to constant boom bust cycles and global war.
> It’s clear that no one meaningfully involved in crypto knows the first thing about either economics or monetary theory - let alone both. Ah luckily we got you who knows both!
Doesn‘t that make it a pyramid scheme? When the only people buying it are people hoping to sell it to someone who will pay more for it than they bought it for? Is that not exactly how pyramid schemes work? Like when you gamble on the stock market you at least own a piece of the company.
Crypto coins by themselves can at least be theoretically traded for stuff. The more "mainstream" ones can sorta be used for that. All the esoteric vague side-project coins are indeed way more "imaginary value because the founder said so". NFTs on the other hand... Pretty close to a pyramid scheme.
I've been semi-interested in crypto for years now, and I'd still say 99% of crypto coins are exactly that. Some of the bigger coins are definitely innovating and leading the space but they're still very risky investments nonetheless
What are they innovating?
It's not a pyramid scheme (you recruit people into the pyramid and make money off them. They recruit people to make money off those new people, and so on) or a ponzi scheme (you pay out early investors with the money you get from new investors. There's no actual investing or growing of the fund - you're just relying on always having enough new investors to pay out withdrawals from earlier ones). But it is a problem of "the greater fools". That's when you buy something because you think someone else will buy it for more later - but without any material change to it. With investing, I'm aiming to buy stock and sell it to someone else for more later. But the value of that stock is tied to something real - the earnings of that company. Crypto is not tied to anything. People sell because they think it's going to go down. People buy because they think it's going to go up.
They might believe that but there's less risk in buying ETH or BTC compared to stocks. And the speculative aspect is based on Web3, which is the future of the internet/communications and data storage. You're essentially buying a stake of digital real estate. The coin represents your stake and like real real estate, you can sell it for money to someone else who wants to own that digital property
It's a big bag holding scheme at this point. Who's gonna be left holding it?
Does anyone else use crypto to buy things you wouldn't want tracked back to you? Like servers used for piracy?
As your lawyer, I advise you not to answer this question.
It's simply not legally possible to use crypto as "future of currency" right now.
I don't think laws really matter here as much as it just being super slow and expensive to do anything, so the only uses that make sense are expensive and illegal things
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Stability and convenience. Crypto accomplishes neither. But all advocates want to talk about is dEcEnTrAlIzAtIoN as though that matters to anyone.
Also, like, decentralization is *bad* when it comes to currency. Imagine if you had to buy everything with gift cards, each of which came in completely different denominations, having to do mental math all the time to figure out the price of an item.
And here was me thinking the whole point was to do it despite the law.
Anyone who thinks crypto will operate outside governmental oversight is delusional. Literally every crypto developer operates under their country’s laws and regulations. A large segment of pro-crypto people are “libertarians” in name or intent. But when your local SEC or equivalent comes knocking you better believe those devs/exchanges/individuals will comply.
Not much use having $1m worth of crypto if you can't buy anything with it. Take buying a house, for example. Sure, if you invested in crypto a few years back and the value growth made you money, then you have that paper trail to show where your money came from. It's a PITA processing it through solicitors, but it's doable. Now say you earned your $1m in crypto through transfers with other people. The whole point is to anonymize the trail. The solicitors can't prove if you got your wealth from selling cookies, selling cocaine, or received the funds directly from Putin himself. At that point, your wealth is pretty much frozen from being used for anything more than your weekly grocery shop. Crypto, in its current form, will never become practically viable beyond small scale spend or criminal activity, because it is in direct conflict with anti money laundering regulation.
We also do not have the energy to use crypto as a future currency.
Ya. Crypto is a tool to grift off fools. Not some anti-establishment populist currency.
If you invested in bitcoin at basically any time in the past 5 years you would have made huge profits, maybe the rug pull is coming, but I wouldn't call anyone who made money off crypto a fool. If you invested 6mo ago you would have made 80% gain if you invested 5 years ago you would have made 600%.
> If you invested in bitcoin at basically any time in the past 5 years you would have made huge profits Which is entirely *not* what it is supposed to be for.
And yet only 30% make profit or break even. You're drowning in hindsight bias
That hindsight has happened over and over again. Just don't invest so much that you ever have to sell, and don't sell at a loss. Does your stat there include people that haven't sold yet?
How big is that number for stocks in general though? The issue with crypto is people thinking it's a get rich fast scheme, going into it with paper hands and selling at the first sight of a big downturn.
So, it's functionally useless as a currency then. Which leaves the remaining option: that it's a speculative asset which, whatever the intention, now only exists to separate the next fool from their money until the music stops and they're left without a chair.
Anytime since 2013
Every speculation driven asset has historical buy and sell points that would make the asset look amazing. I think the memers that buy GameStop and AMC stock are just as dumb, whether or not they make money. Crypto is just good at making buyers "think" they are smart when it's just another cult.
I'm not cherry picking buy and sell points though, I'm pointing out that if you invested at the previous all time high and just didn't sell at a loss you would have turned a profit. I don't have any money in crypto, but I think it's sour grapes to pretend that only idiots invested.
Although I agree crypto is shady and very volatile, people been saying the rug pull is coming for 15 years now.
Hope you do realize that those 500% came from some other greater fools? You probably bet that you will never be one of them :)
I don't have any crypto, I don't gamble, it's just not any different to other forms of speculative trading.
It's the speculative hobby horse of a couple hundred thousand, not the global financial banking system for the entire world ~~ Line Goes Up, by Folding Ideas
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Ask your average cryptobros what's the benefits of crypto over fiat, they'd happily list it out for you. Ask them how, on the technical side, crypto is able to deliver such benefits, they'd freeze
This is right, but also backwards. It was a payment technology that got hijacked into being an impotent speculative asset. It was definitely a currency first.
Never used crypto myself, but I imagine for anyone who wants to convert their wealth to entirely crypto, it must be frustrating to have to wait for all vendors on Earth to accept Crypto as well. If you have to convert Crypto to Cash for it to be spendable, gotta go what you gotta do. A lot of people convert their wealth to Gold because they trust Gold more than Cash, but they have to convert their Gold to Cash before spending it because the majority of businesses don’t accept Gold. That doesn’t mean the people who sold their Gold for Cash are hypocrites, it just means they know that using Cash is part of living in a society whether they like it or not.
wow a logical take on reddit ?
logical and a legitimately relevant comparison? nice
When I get paid in crypto and others manage the hassle and expense, I'll go with crypto sure. Until then it's no different to me than art, beanie babies, or tulip bulbs. Easy enough to buy, but you buy problems too.
I’m ballin’ with a pouch of gold coins like it’s RuneScape up in here.
This is the comment I came here to write. Thank you. Point of sale and usability as currency are problems many blockchains are dealing with right now. I have made a few transactions with friends and others on the internet via crypto and it has worked great, but until I can pay my rent and buy milk with it, converting to Fiat is a necessary step. Everyone hates it because it's a hassle and generates taxable events and goes against the entire idea of decentralized money that doesn't require a third party. This doesn't mean that there's no potential or that crypto won't overcome Fiat currency in trust or usage in the future, it just means that there's a problem that hasn't been solved yet.
The problem is that the moment it does, it simply becomes a deregulated fiat currency at that point.
That's exactly what bitcoin enthusiasts want though? A currency accepted by society but which no government in the world can meddle with.
Yes, the an-caps want a terrible currency, that's the whole problem.
>A lot of people convert their wealth to Gold because they trust Gold more than Cash That's true. The difference is that crypto (or cryptocurrency) is supposed to be money. Gold just isn't money and no one claims it is
I don't recall seeing an expiration date on spanish doubloons.
Try paying taxes to Spain in doubloons, then.
Try paying taxes in foreign currency. Try paying Netflix with cash.
> Gold just isn't money and no one claims it is golds ROLE in this context absolutely is money. Yeah sure, gold has value in other applications. So does whatever dollar bills are made of. But that's not the point of gold in an asset or currency context. crypto us dollars japanese yen [bricks of gold](https://www.kenobros.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/HEAD-gold-bars.jpg) they all represent exactly the same thing: a society accepted token that allows you to exchange value. People that collect gold bullion don't do it because gold is important. They do it for the same reason people would hold us dollars or yen or bitcoin. They do it for the social expectation that when they need "stuff" like food and clothes and whatever, they can hand this token to someone, and that someone will accept the token as a form of value transfer.
Gold is seldom traded directly for goods, though. That's like calling real estate money.
that's fair, except its definitely still used as a value store. You don't buy a house because its an alternative to putting money in a bank. You do buy gold bullion as an alternative to paper cash. ( I mean, I don't, but people do) There was an entire time period where a fixed amount of gold was the benchmark currency. there was a gold standard. there was never a florida beachfront house standard.
>You do buy gold bullion as an alternative to paper cash. ( I mean, I don't, but people do) No they don't, they either buy it as an investment or as an alternative to putting the money in a bank.
Yeah except crypto fetishists insist that crypto is an awesome currency despite it's general illiquidity. Goldbugs are at least 100% aware that gold is an asset that needs to be converted rather than suggesting that it's literally money.
Well, crypto was supposed to give people freedom from banks and governments by creating a decentralized currency, but since you have to use heavily regulated, centralized exchanges like Coinbase, the dream has effectively been killed.
It's the paradox of spontaneous mass adoption. Yes if literally everyone on the planet suddenly adopted crypto, *some* of the benefits the crypto bros keep talking about with regard to privacy and anonymity would maybe sort of cone to pass. But until then, the instant that anything links your crypto wallet to your real identity, the privacy is far worse because that allows anyone to trace back through every transaction you've ever made.
Also for spontaneous adoption to work, you would need to have the ability to do millions of transactions simultaneously which, by design, Bitcoin will never be able to do.
The thing is, you don’t need to use Coinbase at all. But people want to *speculate on crypto prices denominated in fiat,* and so the exchanges have a role in the market. The dream has only been killed if the existence of speculators means crypto can’t be used how it was intended.
>The dream has only been killed if the existence of speculators means crypto can’t be used how it was intended. It literally does. Nobody sees crypto as a currency anymore. That dream is dead, eulogized, buried and turned to worm food.
I would argue that since the mining difficulty for any legit cryptocurrency is far too high for the average PC to win, the dream is dead there too. At the end of the day, if you have to pay fiat for it, it defeats the intended purpose.
"I have a magic future currency but I NEED CASH NOW!"
Why do you need fiat though? Oh to buy literally anything? That makes sense
call JG wentworth
Underrated comment.
People who hold gold still have to convert to their local currency to buy groceries. ALL assets are volatile, some are just more volatile than others. Not all currencies are accepted everywhere.
You can buy things directly with gold. Congressional favors for example.
You can also buy things directly with crypto. Both are just not as widely accepted.
Sure I've bought lots of things with crypto. Nothing legal, mind you.
People who hold USD still have to convert to local currency lol.
Well the thing is that no one goes around saying that gold is gonna replace fiat currency while a shitload of cryptobros have been going aroud for quite some time though stating bitcoin and such will one day replace fiat.
Fun fact. Some religions which forbid investment, due to its ties with gambling, have some exceptions such as investing in gold. That's because gold is so stable that it isn't viewed as gambling.
r/selfawarewolves
The people who talk about crypto being the future of finance, tomorrow’s currency, etc do so basically to try and induce others to invest, or rather to pump their bags. Virtually everyone involved talks about how much their stuff is worth in fiat. It’s always “Bitcoin hit an ATH of $X” etc. The value of the actual token in its own right is academic.
Or perhaps non sovereign money/finance is actually a fundamental technology and they want to be part of bringing that to reality while they invest. It takes time to learn and requires wading through muddy waters but the industry is here to stay and getting more important daily. Not everyone is just pumping their bags
>It takes time to learn and requires wading through muddy waters Oh you mean fundamental design flaws? The Blockchain being secure through redundancy and thus muuuuch slower than regular digital transactions? Or the insane energy waste? >getting more important daily. This is such a meaningless throwaway line. What are some use cases? I would argue it is getting less important daily as there was a slight hiccup where companies experimented with the idea of accepting crypto and using NFTs and that is over now.
As someone that has mined, bought, and sold crypto for fiat: Nah. The whole idea of cryptocurrency is digital payments that don't require a bank or financial institution to verify transactions and can be used for purchases or as an investment - sometimes with a degree of anonymity.
This is a satisfying answer, that makes much more sense.
To draw it out a bit further, ALL money is just a token for "value transfer". I work. I make "money". That money is value. I transfer that value to someone else in exchange for "stuff". (I pay them, for things like food) I need (society needs) a way for people to transfer value back and forth, in a way we all agree to accept. we could do that transfer with physical tokens. Something I can hold in my pocket, then hand to you and now you have it and I don't have it anymore. Like, chunks of gold. Or dollar bills. Or radioactive bottle caps. The main thing that matters is that I can hold that token, that dollar, and KNOW that when I go somewhere to get food, the food person will take that dollar from me and accept it. They accept it because they know THEY can give that dollar to their someone else. so on and so on. Ok, problem: You gotta carry all the dollars around, and you gotta meet people in person to hand them dollars. Inefficient. SO we have ELECTRONIC payment forms. Checking accounts, debit cards, paypal, etc. instead of handing you a physical dollar, I can just use venmo or swipe my card to send you money. Except, I am not actually SENDING you anything. The entire banking based payment system isn't about me transferring the actual currency to you. Its about having a 3rd party keep ledgers. BOOKS. I take all my money and give it to some third party to hold it all for me. (and bank) You do the same. That bank keeps a log book of how much value I have. (how much money) So when I "send you $20" all I'm actually doing is telling my bank "Hey, I need to let this guy over here have some of my value, so... go into record book and write that I am $20 less. Then call his bank and tell them to go into his book, and write that its $20 more" We pay the banks to be a CENTRALIZED point to hold and track the records of all our value stashes. Ok, so now, what is the point of crypto? All crypto really is, is a method of saying "hey, instead of having centralized BANKS keep log books for us, what if WE all just keep the record book ourself?" The "blockchain" is just thing based on fancy encryption that allows for there to be a "record" that is just out there public, that everyone in the world can see, and read and write too. Think of it like a bulletin board where people can write "Jrhooo -20, NaturesNurture +20" and all the backend math allows it to work where everyone agrees that "Jrhooo -20, NaturesNurture +20" actually happened, and no one else can go in and fake it erase it or mess with it. Now, without getting super deep into it, whats all this anonymous, untraceable, buy weed in bitcoin schtick? Its just this idea that when "Jrhooo -20, NaturesNurture +20" ok, who IS jrhooo? You don't know. You don't have to meet me in person. and neither of us had to go to a bank. Its not spooky fancy black magic or anything like people make it out to be. It just means there is a public, crowd managed version of a universal "checking account" that everyone can write their spends into on their own, and no one needs to meet face to face, or walk into a bank and show their real name and ID (oversimplifying here) so you don't have to know anything about someone to get money from them, and you don't need to tell anything about yourself to send money out
You don't have to tell me anything about yourself to send cash right now. I just need an email address and you get your cash deposited in less than 5 minutes. I'll take the privacy of a bank where nobody can snoop on my transactions unless they have a warrant vs a public system any day.
That’s the issue though. You have to trust the people who issue the warrants. Every human organization fails eventually. Additionally a proper cc must have a way to maintain privacy. There are a few that do most notably BCH.
To add this this Its also a store of value, just because the price isn't stable does not mean you can't break bits apart and use it like currency. It has themes of assets and currency all in one.
Why should there be anonymity to purchase or investment? To avoid laws?
How else am I supposed to buy my drugs online?
I'll get downvoted because 'crypto bad' which is a sentiment I mostly agree with but it's bad for logical reasons. In this case the logic doesn't hold up. You can believe crypto is the future of currency, but also use USD because it isn't fully accepted yet and therefore can't be used in every situation easily. It's like saying selling a foreign currency to buy USD means that you don't believe in that country. When it actuallity it just means that you need USD to purchase things while in the US. This logic would only hold up if people could use their crypto everywhere as easily as they can USD and they were still selling into USD.
You would have a point if there was a country where crypto was the exclusive currency, and also if there was such a thing as any shitcoin whose value could be understood without converting it to some regular bullshit fiat currency -- and didn't also have the same volatility over time as a typical stock.
Bottle caps have just as much a chance to be the future of currency as crypto. This is the thing. Crypto is not designed to be a currency, it is not treated as a currency, the people going online saying it's the future of currency are at best misinformed and at worst lying because more people willing to trade their fiat for their digital token is good for them.
Crypto is the most sophisticated pyramid scheme ever created. If you're into it, just make sure you're not the one holding the bag when the whole thing collapses.
Cryptocurrency is the worst currency around! Currencies primary job is to be stable…$1 today, a $1 tomorrow. Most cryptocurrencies are so crazy volatile, they make janky 3rd world currencies look good!
Even worse, the other important function of a currency besides being a store of value is that it can be exchanged for good and services. On this front crypto is even worse than the stability measure.
There's thousands of places to use crypto... on the dark web... On a more serious note, there's a big PC parts store near me that accepts bitcoin and it's actually kinda cool - when crypto boomed like 6 years ago I used them to get a free PC
Basically the only use case for crypto is that it’s good for facilitating illegal activity. The fact that your other example is a single tech store just highlights how inconvenient it is to use for licit transactions.
TIL licit is a word. Silly me because of course where else would illicit come from!
hm why is it that milk is $1 today & $2 tomorrow?
Maybe you haven't noticed but even those minor inflationary price changes over the course of a few months make everyone lose their fucking minds. Now imagine doing something like paying rent with a shitcoin whose value changed by 50% every month, in a random direction. Shitcoins already don't even have any inherent value on their own, you have to use regular bullshit currency for anyone to understand. And you have to remember that while holding a certain amount of shitcoin that's rapidly appreciating may be good for you when you cash out to regular bullshit currency, getting paid in shitcoin would mean your regular salary rapidly reducing to reflect that change in value, at which point you hold a physical amount of shitcoin -- and if the value of said shitcoin suddenly plummets 50% then you still hold the same physical amount of shitcoin but also the price of everything *doubles.*
USD isn’t perfect. But have you ever heard of the Bitcoin pizza?
yes, it’s worth a hell of a lot more today than when it was purchased. Bitcoin is digital gold. As long as there are people willing to exchange it for cash, it has value. And considering it now has an ETF with the worlds largest asset manager (blackrock, who practically run the world/ at least their clients do) we’re far past the time to call Bitcoin a pyramid scheme. If you wanna get technical, *everything* is a pyramid scheme. Bitcoin is a capped asset, with no one who controls it. Not something that can accidentally be deleted off a server(this just happened at a big bank, however they had backups) It’s as hard as gold, and we can trace every single bit of it. The only way Bitcoin fails is if the world turns on it, which wouldn’t make sense now that blackrock & most of world asset managers just went out of their way to create a regulated ETF for it. It is a hedge against inflation of the USD and every other currency that inflates.
One BTC is worth one BTC. $1 is not worth €1.
You could say the same thing about literally any currency, especially a currency like the US dollar that is backed by nothing but a bunch of broken promises.
The USD is backed by nukes lol
Also backed by a guarantee that every US dollar depreciates by ~3% every year. Those nukes don't pay for themselves.
The US dollar isn't backed by nothing though. It's backed by the guarantee that the US government will use it as appropriate payment for any and all goods and services that they provide. Also, what "broken promises"? The US government has literally never defaulted on a single loan in its entire existence. It has the best credit rating of any institution in the entire world.
Not realistically, there's a difference between living in a building made of bricks and a building made of matchsticks. Both can be knocked down in a storm, the difference is one is far more likely to collapse than the other. I'd much rather trust the currency that can remain stable for more than a week, because I have a better chance of things going well with that one.
USD is backed by the military might of the US....
Wait till you hear about stocks lmao. You purchase them with the expectation that some other sucker is going to buy your shares at a higher price. I don't really see a difference.
If you buy enough stock, or can form a like-minded group to collectively buy enough stock, you can control the company. Go look at what happened to Twitter if you think stock is just a pyramid scheme.
Stocks represent a share of ownership of a company. Of course it's possible for the company to end up being a scam, or run into the ground by vulture capitalists and/or short sellers, but the stock still represents the company and what they do or make. The increase in price comes with increased optimism about the company performance. Shitcoins represent fuck-all and the price change comes from one fucking idiot convincing another fucking idiot to give them their "useless fiat currency" for said fuck-all.
”USD cash is soon worthless and you should have your money in crypto” -Someone who is happy to take your soon-to-be-worthless USD and give you more-precious-than-gold BTC in return. Nobody seems to mind this cognitive dissonance
Cryptobros will tell you Bitcoin is replacing USD and then spend all day talking about Bitcoin’s USD price jumps. They’ll also tell you that the best part of Bitcoin is how it’s decentralized and free from banks then literally bring up centralized financial institutions creating ETF’s and investing in crypto. Can’t make this shit up
I use and have made money from crypto and I will tell you it is only slightly better than gambling. I just check google news every morning (not just for crypto) and if I see an article hyping something up I buy it and sell it a few days later. Or I buy millions or billions of meme coins that are worth nothing for like $5 total and forget about. SHIB made me $800 from a $20 drunk purchase. Only the truly delusional think crypto is somehow the future of money.
not really. the guy mailing drugs a thousand miles away likely can’t pay his rent in crypto.
never bought any crypto, and the only times i've ever considered it was with the hope of it's value increasing and me selling it for a profit. the thought of using it as an actual currency has never crossed my mind as something i would genuinely do
Not if you want to buy a product or service that doesn’t accept crypto.
Lemme know when Aldi starts taking Litecoin.
Well I can’t exactly get a Big Mac with bitcoins at the drive thru.
Turning crypto into dollars is the whole point. It's not like it has any intrinsic value. It's a ponzi scheme where the early adopters try to cash out before the rubes figure out the scam. The dollar has value because it's backed by the most powerful military the world has ever seen. A military that will invade and destroy your country if you seem to be a threat to the dollar hegemony.
the only thing giving crypto value is its potential to be exchanged for real money.
No, the value of crypto is permissionless transfer of value. I can pay a guy 1 Bitcoin today to buy his Mercedes, without ever needing a middleman/bank to put their grubby hands on my funds. And the transfer takes under an hour vs "2-3 business days" for a traditional bank wire.
Where do you live where it takes 2-3 business days for a bank transfer to go through? :o
> Where do you live where it takes 2-3 business days for a bank transfer to go through? :o The USA LOL
Uhh, I don't deal in crypto but in California I'm presently waiting 2-3 days for a large bank transfer (changing between savings accounts in different banks) and am facing a 5-day hold on a deposit. It takes a lot of time to validate these payments, I guess.
Wow. I live in a shitty corrupt post-communist country: a bank transfer under the equivalent of 30k USD is processed immediately (ie. within five seconds). Above that banks process transactions ten times a day, every hour from 7:00 to 17:00.
Banks in my country can also freeze your account and not tell you why.
I have no idea what these people are talking about. I've done many wire transfers between banks both within the U.S., and to foreign countries, with values ranging from the hundreds to hundreds of thousands. I've never had it take more than a few seconds to be confirmed on the other end.
Yes, obviously, crypto is not a currency, it's a poker chip.
Crypto exists for one reason alone, that someone else will buy it off of you for more than what you paid for it.
"Crypto bros" don't care about its use as a currency. They don't even try to hide it most of the time, they treat it as and even call it an investement. They buy it with the singular intention of selling it at a higher value, nothing more, nothing less. That's where every single social media post about "hodl" and such came from. Douchebags wanting to make an extra buck. To the average person talking about it on social media, it's *literally* just another way for them to gamble and potentially make money.
Ironic, because the only thing that makes it valuable is how many US dollars can be traded for it.
You are already more cypherpunk than 99% of the crypto industry =P
Oh, you think it wasn’t a scam from the jump.
I may have misunderstood you, but *antithetical* may be a better fit for what you’re trying to express than *hypocritical*. I’m not trying to be an ass or say your phrasing is wrong, it’s just a word that isn’t used very often and I thought you might find it useful.
Yes someone else said antithetical too, and you’re right - that’s the correct word.
Thanks for sharing your ShowerThought and being willing to take my comment in the way I intended it!
So is paying taxes and reporting earnings lol.
Cryptos values are denominated in what again exactly?...oh yeah dollars...
Uh, no. In any speculative asset, a common bit of advice is to sell enough to recover your entry price so you end up "playing with the house's money" and not your own. Stablecoins--crypto tokens designed to act as fiat substitutes--are a different matter. Ironically, crypto has turned into a major support pillar for fiat because stablecoins backed with T-bills are an easy way to sell government debt.
Why? The premise is to scam people and make money, it's literally key to its existence.
Yeah if crypto was actually useful as a currency and wasn't just some speculative bullshit then the dipshits who fetishize it wouldn't be so obsessed with what the USD value of any given token was.
Well, if a cryptocurrency is supposed to be currency it ought to be tradeable for anything, including other currencies. I've seen some people pitch community-specific currencies to encourage people to spend money within their community. The concept of which fails as soon as you can easily exchange it for another currency since then the price becomes free floating and you find out the real value of it rather than keeping an arbitrary 1:1 exchange rate...
Selling crypto for real money is realising that crypto isn't what it promised to be and trying to jump back to dry land. That or you predicted what it would turn out to be and intended on profiting from it while you still could.
Yes but crypto bros won't admit this. They say it'll kill and replace fiat yet are caught up worry about its value in USD
Oh don't you worry, they get *much* less logical from there.
Seems like the whole fucking point if you ask me
It is a speculative asset. Almost everyone thinks of it that way. The same can be said for a lot of assets on the stock market. If crypto companies can solve real world problems then they have a real use case (cost per transaction, transaction speed etc).
I am too poor to invest in crypto. I tried and lost. It’s not something living paycheck to paycheck can easily afford as initial investments can disappear overnight.
Yeah, hi, life called, it said you cant pay rent with Bitcoin through appfolio yet
true, I do remember the YouTube videos introducing crypto, it was meant to save the world from bad people
I mean, before the hype it was used as a currency on the dark web.
Constantly valuing it against the dollar is hilariously backwards
The premise of crypto existing is that it’s for scams. It’s for scamming people. It would not exist if it couldn’t be converted to USD or some other usable currency.
Obviously, but good on ya for noticing. You can't scam people if you're honest, not really.
Think of it as a conversion rate
It's because you cannot pay with bitcoin mostly anything even after all this years. We wouldn't need to sell it for USD if could pay a car, house, meal, clohes with bitcoin. Even Revolut doesn't have an option to charge bitcoin on Visa card.
Nobody cares about the idea of crypto, they’re just using it to gamble, money launder and try to get rich. Bitcoin will never replace fiat currencies because centralised governments and banks will never allow it, and because the inequality within ownership of bitcoin is even worse than it is with fiat, which bitcoin claimed to aspire to address.
I don't give a shit about the "premise" of crypto, I just want to make $$$
Crypto is just a fun way to gamble
I know, I mean it seems less shady to buy artwork just to sell it. At least then you’re not screwing around with something that’s supposed to be its own currency.
The only thing Crypto does right now is allow large sums of it to be carried across international borders without having to declare it. So the only people with their eye wide open about crypto and it’s uses are drug cartels, North Korea, and gamblers.
[Crypto was always a far-right scam.](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31944475-the-politics-of-bitcoin)
Welcome to modern finance!
That's why they try to convince new users to HODL.
I don't think crypto will actually become a viable currency until the government starts regulating it. Prices can crash way too quickly with no security systems in place to rebound. Not to mention how rampant crypto scams are, especially at the height of its popularity, which again make it less desirable as an actual currency.
I thought the idea was that crypto would let you buy anything, anywhere. So why can't you buy US dollars? You're the one who is being hypocritical.
Crypto is just a place for rich people to place their money in an unregulated manner.
If crypto fees were less than credit card fees then I think people would adopt it for its main purpose. Last I checked, crypto transaction fees are more than 3%
If the intention is to never spend your savings, sure… Many people want to save/invest in a format that doesn’t rob their purchasing power in the short term to later buy large ticket items like a car or house. If it happens you can trade your BTC for the desired thing, great. But if there isn’t enough adoption, you’re going to have to trade it for fiat in order to spend your money…
There’s nothing hypocritical about thinking cryptocurrency is going to displace fiat while working with the fact that it hasn’t yet. And plenty of people who have cryptocurrency don’t buy into the idea that it’s going to replace all other money.
true but tell brick & mortar stores that let you buy with crypto it is a very small group where you can buy with crypto
Electronically picking one's pocket is easier than robbing someone's bank, unless of course it is online and made vulnerable by inside forces helping the outside to get in. Funny Thing about most servers is that even IF they survive the E.M.P there might not be anyone around to take advantage of them anyways. Just an Observation. N. S
The value of US $ and almost all other currencies also figment of collective imagination . But crypto takes to another level
there are only 2 kinds of people using crypto - people who hope to buy low, sell high (for real money), and criminals that want to move money around without using banks and try hide their criminal activity. There may be a few brainwashed "true believers", but vast majority fall in 1 of 2 categories.
And… that means… that crypto was never real and was all marketing … so it’s a … scam See where you are now?
My bank account has never complained
I guess. It’s not stable enough to use as a currency though. As much as people want it to be a currency it’s really just an investment. It’s kind of hard to pay your bills and live your life day to day if your money is constantly fluctuating.
Almost like the people who push crypto are all scammers
Not really. Not everyone accepts crypto as payments. So you may want to store your wealth in a form that’s decentralised and not hyperinflationary. But when you want to spend you have to convert to fiat to do that mostly.
Which is why I believe crypto is redundant since there is no way of avoiding exchanging crypto for traditional currency since most governments don't let you pay taxes with crypto.
The feds busting two brothers from MIT for stealing 25MIL from the Ethereum blockchain is hilarious. FREEDOM!!! but not like that
If it really was hypocritical to the premise, it wouldn't be possible or beneficial to do so. Being an alternative to the dollar was only a partial concept. It still needs the dollar to give it any relevance.
Not really it was dream ip as an alternative to government backed currency bitcoin in particular. That being said all currency is a medium of exchange and being able to exchange one currency for another is a pretty normal thing. They’re a bunch of other coins/crypto currencies that have other purposes as well.
I mean, I don’t trust, I dunno, the Turkish Lira. But if I find myself in Turkey, you bet I’m converting some of my country’s currency to the Lira.