“ 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.
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?