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.
It’s good for buying things online when your bank has an overly strict fraud detection system that blocks legitimate purchases because the seller is in a different country or whatever.
Crypto is mostly useful for extralegal activities.
You can technically donate for some services with it, but to acquire crypto you need to either KYC to some exchange which isn’t not only a massive pain, but there are very serious privacy implications with it. Or you can acquire it via other means which means you will be buying it at high prices.
Also note that most cryptocurrencies aren’t anonymous, every transaction is public in the block chain and can be traced back to you.
So if you really know what you’re doing you can use privacy coins as a tool to transfer money anonymously, but that’s pretty much it’s only real world application.
Also, from what I understand (I’m no cryptographer) cryptocurrencies use public key cryptography so quantum computers may in the future break all cryptocurrencies and well deanonymise all previously anonymous privacy coins transactions stored in the blockchains.
It’s an excellent waste of electricity and computational resources
You can donate to private trackers with it, they already figure out how to convert it to fiat and take care of hosting
Buying drugs
Gambling.
It’s useful for sending money internationally in situations that would be otherwise difficult
You can use Monero to buy things anonymously. Whilst not perfect, it makes it significantly harder to identity or trace you. Other than that, not really, that’s the only real use case for crypto in my opinion, for privacy
+1 for Monero for sure. I wouldn’t even say its just good for buying drugs like some others suggested.
https://monerica.com/ is made for you to find stuff to buy with monero. You can find almost anything there including phsical wares like clothes, food, and also lots of online services lile hosting providers for example. I even saw an accounting firm there.
Wouldn’t cash work the same here?
If you’re able to use cash, then that works too. Unfortunately, you can’t insert cash into your computer though, lol
Money laundering, it’s really good for that
Apart from privacy coins like Monero, it’s all traceable
Good luck tracing coins that I bought for cash from John Shadyman who can’t give half a shit about KYC.
Spend some time looking into how the FBI traces wallets. It’s pretty easy, and it’s that at some point, John Shadyman’s wallet gets tied to people tied to you. The entire Privacy community considers cash better than every crypto other than Monero.
Any pointers other than “go read some internet”? That’s a rather broad reference.
John Shadyman’s wallet gets tied to people tied to you
What “people tied to you”? I use the coins to pay some 1337Cr1m3L0rd, with neither of us ever catching a remote semblance of knowing who the other one is. Or, move them to Pierre LeCrook, who’s again giving out cash without asking questions. Shadyman and LeCrook are actually the closest links to me, but again good luck proving that I went to their house and received coins for cash or vice versa.
Just one point to add: there is no currency that is universally accepted. You probably cant buy a pizza with Kuwaiti dinar right now either. But that’s definitely a currency. So your part about “everyone agrees” is not really true of any currency. They work only for a subset of humanity who mutually agree it has value. And you can absolutely find people who will buy crypto from you using other currencies, or give you goods and services for it. Those people are rather randomly distributed around the world though instead of being grouped inside one geographic border. That’s the only difference.
Crime, mostly.
It lets people buy illegal stuff (like drugs or HRT), which can be good and bad.
It’s possible to buy gift cards for different services with it.The first real-world transaction with bitcoin was a pizza funnily enough.
A pizza for 10,000 bitcoins no less, must be the most expensive pizza in the world lmao
Ah, but would Bitcoin ever be worth more than a dollar if it wasn’t for that purchase?
I’ve bought some online services with it.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard that trans people use it to buy hormones because HRT is usually not covered by national healthcare or insurance, so the people selling them aren’t doing so fully entirely technically legally.
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.
