Not a rhetorical question, despite the flippant phrasing. I'd absolutely love to see crypto succeed, but it doesn't look like it's gonna be useful for white and grey market transactions any time soon. For those not familiar, the white market is the documented, above-ground economy, the grey market is the informal/unlicensed economy, and the black market consists of goods and services that are outright criminalized.
Using crypto for white market transactions would arguably defeat the purpose, but on the grey market cash continues to be king, even though this is exactly where you'd expect crypto to be useful. Gold and silver intuitively seem like a good option for grey market transactions, but they're way too traceable, and while the grey market is usually left alone, when the piggies do get sicced on a given grey market you're up shit creek.
But you're not wrong about its usability being awful for day-to-day purchases. Though I will say that most disallow a centralized entity from printing however much they feel like for "stimulus" and fucking everyone.
But everyone treating it like a security has effectively already given up on it as a currency. No one stashes USD under their mattress waiting for it to increase in value. Deflation encourages hoarding which decreases utility as a currency. Plus transactions getting more and more difficult as time goes on.
It's called a "currency" but really it's a stock like as in the stock market.
You could trade a stock directly to somebody, pay 1 share of nVidia for 1 cattle, but primarily you add one step of selling it for cash and trading with cash. Same thing with bitcoin. The 10 transactions per second harkens back to when the stock market had a trading floor and people shouting orders.
OP saying it's a pyramid scheme is like calling the stock market a pyramid scheme. In a sense, but stocks are also a way to preserve wealth since it tracks inflation (when a currency devalues the amount you can get for selling your stock increases).
Only with bitcoin you don't have to bet on the performance of a company. You're betting on the continuation of a 'bitcoin economy'. If there's a disruption of a global economy, networks, or trust in bitcoin you could lose your investment, but probably those things are less likely than the CEO being arrested for a crime and tanking a stock.
Exactly. The USD is also worthless. The difference is that crypto doesn't have a trillion dollar per year military enforcing it's usage.
another difference is that i don't have to waste gigawatts of energy handing anyone a paper bill.
The funny part is you just valued the military in worthless dollars :)
It's a hard habit to shake.
That is how they're valued though. The government taxes and spends in USD. I wonder if the IRS accepts tax payment in crypto... LOL
There's a possibility that a cryptocurrency will come along which fixes those problems, preventing anyone from being able to hoard it or mine it with brute force processing power, and preventing it from being used for speculation. But that's probably just wishful thinking.