“ They really aren’t. A currency is only worth anything if normal people are willing to trade them en masse. For the majority/normal people to trade them en Maße there needs to be an universally agreed upon use for them. A use that taxes give, since no matter who you are, you must pay your taxes in the state issued currency.
Crypto and other alt currency tokens are worthless by definition”
https://reddit.com/r/technology/s/TTK0bCHDDN
Don’t necessarily agree with it, but I get why someone would have that take.
Trade outside of government control makes no sense to government bureaucrats.
Tbf, let’s say the state does collapse, how do you even decide “a loaf of bread is worth X in Bitcoin, Y in ETH, Z in Dogecoin”, etc?
Same way you decide that a loaf of bread is worth $2 in USD, and then you can use exchange rates to convert that into any number of other currencies.
In case of a state collapse, that would be the easiest of things. People have used all sorts of things as currency, including shells (from the beach), cigarettes.
How do we determine the cost of bread in dollars?
The dollar is propped up by smoke and mirrors and the backing of the government. The crypto is just smoke.
It's all up in smoke anyway.
We use currency because direct trade seems barbaric to us, even though the very rich do it all the time.
Yes. Both currencies are actually worthless since the fed stole the gold backing our dollars. But one has institutional force behind it, and one is literally just electrons that vanish when your power is out or your internet is cut. So one is more functionally worthless.
The real alternative currency is metal, and better than gold is a combined holding of lead, copper and brass.
Mostly it's just a convenience and a metric to go by, as opposed to a classic bartering system. Like who honestly wants to haggle over every possible trade or exchange of goods? It maybe made more sense when people lived to be as self-sufficiency as possible.
This is more of a general response to the direct trade/bartering part of your statement.
Of course the wealthy and powerful merely live off of words and favors. That's all they ever do, even in their work, is talk and cut deals. They never actually do anything even remotely hands on.
Inflation is a leftist invention. It’s caused by infinite printing of currency.
All you have to do is not print more currency than you have money.
Money is specie. You can’t create it out of thin air. Currency was only created to be a claim check to money, because carrying money around is heavy (and somewhat dangerous). When there’s more currency than there is money, that’s adulteration (and was generally punished by death when the bankers who did it were caught). Now they create currency every time a loan is written. Inflation only happens because of this.
Boomers and the tech illterate have no understand of crypto so they make shit up like they do with any tech and then try to argue with people about it who get fed up with them, news at 10. It's amazing how even with all the information out there people still insist on these ridiculous takes.
I once got into an argument with somebody about crypto and I was making a point about Bitcoin being open source. The guy couldn't even explain what open source was, that's the level of discourse we're dealing with over crypto now so why should I bother? The fact that this article is trying to equate NFTs with Cryptocurrency is pants on head retarded, they are nothing to do with each other. The main thing that NFTs do is utilise blockchain technology and that's about it. It was an originally interesting idea to tie identity to the blockchain as an example using them for voting then some scammers got a hold of NFTs and decided they could place value on a bunch of images and digital items which dumb people bought into and now they're blaming cryptocurrency generally for it.
Ooooo I fucking hate this and yes I'm somebody who knows a lot about crypto and I've traded it myself. The irony of it is, these people who simply don't understand crypto are probably going to get themselves scammed one day precisely because of their ignorance. What people don't understand is that at least for Bitcoin and Ethereum they definitely have value, it's just that there have been plenty of front end scams setup that people have fallen for. The media have also done an excellent job tricking dumb normies into thinking these currencies have been 'hacked' among other false information which they haven't.
In what way do they have any value beyond the usage of transactions? Are they cornerstone of anything of worth (except the scams) as building blocks? Metal can be used in industry for something, which not something i'm seeing with Bitcoin or Ethereum.
The transactions are exactly what give any currency value precisely because it's os difficult to freely transfer currency these days, anybody who has actual money will tell you this frankly. As for the scams, those are all front end and have nothing to do with the currency itself. There are no restrictions on where you can send your money too and it's all for a very low fee. You could potentially setup a remote PC in Russia if you really wanted to assuming you have a secure place and then transfer your money over there, that sort of thing. There's also the fact that Bitcoin is artificially scarce unlike other digital currency and there's a lot of background code to ensure nothing can be faked. There's only a set number of coins that can ever be mined but they can be divided for easier trade.
As an example when you read news about 'cryptocurrency scams' the narrative being established is very clever, what the articles leave out is people frequently do dumb things with their currencies like leave them in online wallets then when the owners of these wallets have enough they take the money and run. They do very little background checks on what they 'invest' in or buy and then they get themselves scammed.
Now don't get me wrong, it's very easily done because some of these scams are quite clever but basically as long as you hold your currency in a wallet you own on your PC you're going to be fine. The only people who I've seen get targeted directly and had their funds stolen are people who ended up downloading ransomware that latched onto their systems. Awhile back there was an incident when Fallout 4 came out and there was this guy who downloaded a pirated copy of Fallout 4 and he ended up losing his coins because of it.
That's how people lose their money, it's not actually the fault of cryptocurrency itself but of course it's in the media's best interest people don't find that information out so they love printing bullshit about Bitcoin whenever possible even to this day.
Alright, seems we are on a similar page, I misunderstood you as arguing for it being money with value, rather than just a currency for transactions.
Hello fellow currency autist :D yes I do know the difference between currency and money. Now I totally get your perspective on this, at least you're reasonable so I understand the questions, I've come across some major tech illiterate boomers in my time when it comes to this topic so it's very frustrating and a topic I sometimes avoid. I'll use that language from now on if we're both people who understand economics.
Sorry yes, I was using normie language there, no it does not necessarily have intrinsic value but as both of us will know value can be created from the currency depending on how it's all setup. That's where the whole concept of artificial scarcity comes from. I could also bore you all to death about the concept of a 51% attack if you like lol.
I think I already know of the 51% attack concept, although i'm not keeping up to date with cryptocurrency, have there been any major changes to it?
The problem is it's never been tried as of yet, the closest we got was when the cloud computing company CEX if I remember the name correctly had just about gotten there. I was one of the ones back in the day begging on the forums for them to try and do it as a stress test. We don't seem to have reached that possibility since because Bitcoin has been adopted quite a bit. The only other way may be quantum computing.
Interesting, did not even know that it was close to be tried in bitcoin, Should not the test be able to be replicated in theory (I know live fire exercise is the best stress test) with a branch spinoff in a much smaller environment?
What the hell do you do with it if you have some, anyway? How do you turn it into money?
There are many reliable exchanges (kraken has a good reputation)
You can easily buy and sell hundreds of bitcoin in a second for minimal cost.
Crypto is worthless because it can't even beat Mastercard in terms of security and transfer speed. The only way crypto has it beat is anonymity, and the only use nowadays for anonymity in currency use is because you intend to do black market purchasing.
Because of this, Crypto now has a rep - if you're buying crypto and actually using it, it's likely it's for illegal purposes, so it's going to attract more and more fed attention until it finally disappears.
It's not secure, bitcoin and others get stolen all the time via wallets. With Mastercard you can call in a stolen card and not lose any money. With bitcoin, you're SOL, there's no customer service going to protect your money.
It's not decentralized, most of it is owned by rich speculators, it's not money "for the people" it's not even easily accessible since no more can be created after a point.
And it's value disappears when it's created. At least the gold standard could claim the money has value as gold - bitcoin costs immense energy to create and the result is just a proof of work which serves no purpose outside of its intrinsic ability to waste energy on verification. Fiat holds value against the value of a country. Despite being fiat since 1970, the US still holds the most powerful currency that every other country wants to do business with due to how fairly and effectively it can be used worldwide. Bitcoin wishes it was that but it's the fact that it's tightly regulated is why people use the US dollar - not having any regulations or controls on the coin besides inability to create more isn't what people value in a currency.
The problem is that creators of the bitcoin only assumed that being able to prevent someone from overprinting the currency was sufficient to ensure it would be stable, but it's proven to be anything but.
Yeah, but they'd have been better off with just exchanging to a stable currency instead, crypto tends to be very volatile.
Crypto isn't anonymous, it's pseudonymous. You're recording all your transactions in a public ledger that the authorities can peruse without even needing a warrant, so even for criminal uses it's probably overrated.
This part is completely correct, assuming that that second bit should be read "trade them en masse" and that the German character doesn't change the meaning in a way I don't know. It's pretty much a roundabout description of the purpose of currency—to be a reasonably divisible, reasonably transportable, not easily duplicable token representing value. By having these traits, currency becomes valuable as a bartering tool, because instead of having to have things my neighbor wants to trade for directly, I give him currency, then he swaps that currency for the assets he wants elsewhere.
This part is completely moronic. I also can't pay taxes by handing over my car, my computer, my clothes, my food, or my house, or any number of other assets I have. That doesn't make those things worthless. As long as any crypto token fulfills the aforementioned functions of currency including that it can be traded for a unit I can pay taxes with, it will still be valuable as a bartering tool.
If that were the case then a Euro would be worthless to Apple since they have to pay U.S. taxes in dollars. But they do sell iPhone in Euros because one currency can be converted into another.
Just like you can do with crypto.
If you can't sell coins to buy your local currency then one or the other is worthless. And probably it's the one that can be printed in unlimited amounts by the local government and not the one with ever-decreasing new coins.
They paid $16 billion in income tax in dollars, not Euros.
Not the best example since Apple make so much money they can cover their income taxes with domestic sales, but most international companies have to convert money from other currencies into their local currency in order to pay taxes and employees.
It doesn't matter if that other currency is Euro or crypto, neither can be used to pay their bills.
I didn't say either of those things.
You deceptively edited out the context. If you're converting currency into your local one, whether it's Euro or crypto doesn't matter.
You're arguing with things I didn't say and intentionally missing the point, which to reiterate is that as long as you can convert into your local currency then the idea that crypto is worthless "because taxes" is dumb.
You inferred that I was saying Apple only pays taxes in the US and no other taxes anywhere else, but I didn't say that.
Did you honestly think I thought Apple doesn't pay any VAT/sales tax in Europe? Or they don't have a tiny EU/shell corps to manage their small number of employees there and manage local stores and lawyers and whatnot?
This is not a valid way to approach a conversation, assuming that your peer is an absolute moron and then saying "aha I implied this strawman because you're an absolute moron because only an absolute moron would make that strawman argument".
The only mistake I made here is using an outdated example; in the not so distant past Apple was sitting on a stockpile of foreign currency and draining it's U.S. reserves to pay its taxes and other obligations, but now they make so much money that's not even a concern for them at present.
USD and other currencies are GUARANTEED to deflate your purchasing value over time.
Your choice is to invest in something which is volatile and may go up or down.
Or keep it in USD which is stolen from you via inflation
Something, yes. Not necessarily crypto.
Something like and index fund -- I dont' mean to plug wall street -- but a very diversified investment portfolio tends to do well over the long term. You will make more money than inflation will take from you. Naturally, because it's an investment by proxy in the profits of people who may actually build things. At least they turn capital into cashflow.
Nocoiner cope, tbh.
Yeah stablecoins for them can be a low cost banking tool. Like forget earning interest on it, these people lack even a safe place to store their wealth week to week. They may be able to earn interest on crypto, but even if they don't the storage was better than they might get from local banks run by the government.
At a global level, a currency has value because it is access to a certain market. So long as that market is good to buy from or sell to, the currency is valuable. If the market is unreliable or barren, the currency loses value. This value trickles down to the average joe.
Apparently bitcoin is going to "half" sometime in march. I guess bitcoin will be twice as hard to mine.
Sounds like a ploy to make existing holdings bigger. If new coins are harder to make, they would naturally have higher value, right?
This is the best answer to why we need crypto :
https://twitter.com/permissionless/status/1702054516458156126
I'm just here to enjoy some lulz from reading comments from people who don't know how to properly use cryptocurrency.
In their defense, however - the information I gained was quite difficult to come by. In fact, I was convinced that the use of cryptocurrency meant to give up my privacy. I was wrong.
Modern Monetary Theory, trending sibling of Keynesianism for internet mouth breathers to fake smartness while worshiping government and normalizing boundless debt. An honest academic MMT proponent will temper their claims about government spending giving the dollar unlimited power, but it's still specious magical nonsense.