“ 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.
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.
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.