Submitted 4 hours ago by early_riser@lemmy.world to [deleted]
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.
Bitcoin alone uses more electricity than Norway.
And that electricity is mostly from burning coal, so crypto is great for creating global warming
Wait until you hear about the energy cost of traditional finances.
This is a silly thing to say. Normal payment processing uses more energy, but that’s only because there are many, many more payments going through it. It’s orders of magnitude more energy-efficient than crypto.
It’s great for being paid while working abroad.
It was (briefly) useful for buying and selling illicit substances.
If you were famous it was also good for scamming your audience :3
It still is
I found crypto earlier than some. (not everyone – if I had more I wouldnt have to work anymore, haha!)
IMHO, the main value proposition of crypto is permissionless peer-to-peer payments. If we both have crypto wallets, and you send me an address to make a payment to, I can send that without needing anyone’s approval first. I don’t need any bank to agree to have me as a customer first, or any government to approve why the transaction is taking place. All I need is a functioning payment network, and the original Bitcoin white paper solved how to provide that and preserve anonymity. (Really Pseudo-anonymity, but only the nerds care about the difference)
As an academic experiment regarding permissionless payments, it is a resounding success. But, it turns out, Governments have laws regarding who can pay who regardless of the medium. So, just because Bitcoin enables permissionless payments doesn’t mean you done need to ask permission.
Furthermore, the rapid increase in crypto prices really doomed any chance at all for useful adoption. Because people don’t want to spend crypto anymore. They view it as a Store of Value, and who can blame them, given how it has risen from nothing to a > $2T market cap, even after the recent downturn? You used to be able to use crypto in regular transactions, but not anymore.
So it is digital cash without the backing of a government and no stability.
You’re not wrong, but why is not having the backing of a government a bad thing?
I was on a forum in 2009-2010 when another member posted asking whether they should get into bitcoin. I found a video pitching it, can’t remember if the poster linked it or I googled bitcoin after reading their post. I said it sounded sketchy and advised against it.
It’s great for sending money abroad. No bank, minimal fees. I use it for that all the time, to send friends gifts for weddings and birthdays and stuff.
Yes, this requires everyone in the transaction to be on the network and know how to sell cryptocurrency; the question is whether it’s useful, not whether it’s useful with no caveats 😋
Heating.
But resistive electrical heating is slightly more efficient. Heat pumps are considerably more efficient.
So - buying drugs.
Nope
Please read kobo.com/…/attack-of-the-50-foot-blockchain-bitco…
Steam STOPPED taking cryptocurrencies, because of the normal level of criminality in the people drenched in them… “you do NOT want to be doing business with these people”.
I’d use an Algorand-type blockchain for both accounting-records ( breaking “cooking the books” ) & for currency,
but then you’ve got monero which is engineered specifically to enforce that money-laundering is unbreakable, so that organized-crime can move money without any accountability ( I’m including criminal-government-entities, including insider-trading, in organized-crime ).
Nobody’s making the right infrastructure-decisions, … so whatever.
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There are a few services you van but online that accept crypto. Like hosting provider Vultr. Other things do accept bitcoin like non official student money transfer services.
But all of this is not as wide spread. I did use it a couple of time for actually transferring money, and also buying a software plus support.
Of of our clients (fashion) did setup Etherum payments for some physical products and their NFTs and actually got sales.
Why are you asking a question when you clearly made up you mind already? :)
You are wrong of course, you can buy anything with crypto as long as the other person accepts crypto (there are dozens of marketplace, not only darknet ones, e.g. xmrbazaar).
My instance hosting is paid for in Monero. I plan to change it soon to another hosting, which also accepts Monero. The domain is also paid for in Monero. Same for my VPN (Mullvad actually offers 10% off when you pay in crypto!).
I regularly donate to projects such as GrapheneOS, Qubes, Whonix, TOR using Monero. I donate Monero to support people hosting things I use, e.g. invidious instances.
Your employer absolutely can pay you in crypto if they choose to, and there are examples of people who do receive their salary in crypto. You could easily find examples/articles about that if you wanted to.
No, money is not defined by “everyone agreeing that it is valuable and willing to exchange it for goods and services”. Do you think Zimbabwean dollar (or any other foreign currency other than a few most popular ones) is valuable? Would you agree to sell me your goods and services for it? Why not? Right, because it is not the currency YOU use. Other people use it, so it is money for them. Same with crypto. People use it as trustless p2p money whether you like it or not.
If you need to hate crypto so much please get back to arguments such as “oh no it uses a lot of energy and allows people to freely exchange it for goods and services buy drugs on the internet”, at least those are correct. Please also subscribe to r/buttcoin if you use reddit.
r/buttcoin
hehe… “butt”
The most famous transaction was for pizza. Your question is disingenuous baiting.
Crime.
IWW4@lemmy.zip 22 minutes ago
It si great for taking sucker’s money.