It was (briefly) useful for buying and selling illicit substances.

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 and Monero shills 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, and about scamming people, regardless of the medium. So, just because Bitcoin enables permissionless payments doesn't mean you can pay whomever you want, or makes scams somehow permissible.

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.

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 😋

Bitcoin alone uses more electricity than Norway.

And that electricity is mostly from burning coal, so crypto is great for creating global warming

Just one point to add: there is no currency that is universally accepted. You probably cant buy a pizza with Kuwaiti dinar right now either. But that’s definitely a currency. So your part about “everyone agrees” is not really true of any currency. They work only for a subset of humanity who mutually agree it has value. And you can absolutely find people who will buy crypto from you using other currencies, or give you goods and services for it. Those people are rather randomly distributed around the world though instead of being grouped inside one geographic border. That’s the only difference.

In the distant past I used to pay for my phone bill with Bitcoin that I earned through various side jobs. That ended up being convenient because my VOIP company was based in a different country as were the side jobs. But later the transaction costs for Bitcoin rose and it didn't make sense.

You wrote that money is money because everyone agrees it's valuable. But if I go to a pizza place in New York City and try to pay in Thai baht, they probably won't take it. Therefore, it's not money... But of course it's money. It's just not the right kind of money for that place.

Money laundering, it's really good for that

Anecdotally, I've heard that trans people use it to buy hormones because HRT is usually not covered by national healthcare or insurance, so the people selling them aren't doing so fully entirely technically legally.

Buying hormones for diy hrt

Short answer: No.

Hide money from government

You can't carry suitcases of money when you're fleeing a country, so cryptos it is...

It's an excellent waste of electricity and computational resources

My understanding is this. Let's say Valve accepted crypto payments. If they did, they wouldn't need to go through middlemen payment processors like Visa and Mastercard that can use their influence to dictate what games can and can't be published on Steam.

But yeah the way it works in practice seems to make crypto a commodity, not a currency.

Nope

It's useful for sending money internationally in situations that would be otherwise difficult

Crime, mostly.

It’s good for losing a bunch of money.

It's great for being paid while working abroad.

Sometimes it's expensive or difficult to send money between two countries, depending on which countries they are. But if you know how to send crypto, it's the same process and price no matter where it's going.

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 marketplaces, 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!) and mail. 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.

You can use Monero to buy things anonymously. Whilst not perfect, it makes it significantly harder to identity or trace you. Other than that, not really, that's the only real use case for crypto in my opinion, for privacy

The way I look at it is that cryptocurrency is basically a security with no real use, but it can store 'value' in the same way those NFT things stored value for a while. There are more bullshitters for crypto, so they'll keep that hype train going longer, and you can semi work it to get some profit by buying the security low, and selling it high.

There was a post a while ago about how around something like 2020 or whatever, with billions invested in it, and with huge amounts of power/electricity going towards it, bitcoin had something like less than 10 transactions per minute globally. Like it's absolute dogshit when ti comes to transactions, in part because it's not a currency despite its name.

Currencies need to depreciate in value via inflation -- crypto tends to just store value and go up / down solely on its isolated demand as a nebulous concept. In fact, one of the bragging points from cryptobros is often this misguided notion that crypto is a hedge against inflation -- as that 'benefit' basically disqualifies it as a proper currency. If you get $1000, and that $1000 is able to buy you some quantity of goods, you need that money to be able to buy less of those goods in the future in order to encourage people to actually use the fucking thing. If you had $1000, but were almost assured that it would be able to buy twice as many goods in the future if you just held on to it for a bit under your mattress, you wouldn't spend the money... ever. Sorta like those crazy early crypto experiments where uni students were given like 25 bitcoin to see how they'd spend it -- and a bunch did exactly what you said in your opening bit, bought pizzas (you could at the time). Bet they would've preferred to buy a bunch of houses and sports cars later on, if they'd realised how popular the fad would get. Bitcoin only tends to go 'down' in value when people completely exit the currency, so it's not a valid currency.

I think you're generally right in your note about it needing to be exchanged. The whole point of currencies is that you don't want them to sit idle under someone's bed. Banks/Credit Unions provide savings accounts that pay interest, though typically slightly less than inflation. This is basically a function where because of inflation, you don't want to have your money just sit under your bed, you want to invest it in at least a savings account/term deposit -- but what's actually happening there, is that you're committing your money to the financial institution for a fixed period, and they're subsequently loaning that out to someone so that person can buy a house (typically) -- and then their payments on that house, is what generates your interest earnings (and the banks profits). The house itself is a security, with a general stable/safe valuation, so if that person can't make their payments on the house, the bank can foreclose, sell it, and still pay you your interest. So your savings are generally very safe -- especially, frankly, with simple/smaller financial institutions that aren't trying to do fancy bullshit / aren't doing any higher risk wealth management type back end tricks. Main point being though, that because of inflation, even people who have 'too much' capital, put it into the market, and it generates economic activity as a result.

Crypto, being a security, doesn't behave too well in this situation either -- in that you can't realistically hold a security and pay interest on it based on being able to use that security to fund other economic activity. Sorta like if someone hands you 10 shares of a stock (which has a variable price), and you've gotta figure out a way to pay that person back 12 shares of stock in a year, buy giving those 10 shares to someone else. What if they don't want shares of that stock? What if the stock price goes down, or up, significantly? There's just an absurd amount of risk, that would be considered wildly untenable for something like a person's core savings vehicle. There are some "interest paying" crypto type accounts these days, but that's a whole shitload of financial shenanigans and cryptobro bullshit. Cryptocurrencies are basically an economic blackhole.

And speaking of governments, anyone saying that crypto is useful because you can send money globally, is a moron. Banks/Financial institutions have the ability to do global money transfers with ease. The reason they can't/don't, is because of LEGAL reasons and regulatory restrictions from governments - it's not some technical restriction that crypto magically solves. Laws like "You can't let people fund terrorist groups". Crypto being able to do those sorts of things quickly is just a matter of them not obeying any of the laws or regulations from governments. That's not a 'good' thing in general. Many of the recent pushes from crypto sorts to get places like the States to recognize them, are basically resulting in banks getting less restrictions -- which really isn't a win. Crypto shows up and is like "We like sending money to north korea, so you gotta remove or neuter that whole know your customer thing for fintechs. Here Mr USA administration, we can pay you by buying millions of dollars of your personal 'crypto currency' to help with signing the bill. See, isn't it so much better to have no regulations/oversight on transactions?! It's win win!"

And the last negative I'll note, from my pov at least, is that the core mechanics of most crypto currencies is obfuscated and controlled by cryptobros. Financial industry people make money, but they don't make the sort of explosive, concentrated wealth that you see occur in crypto for the people who maintain those systems. That's partly because the financial industry is larger, and involves government components -- while crypto currencies are often just some techbro goin "let's fork bitcoin and stick a dog face on it and sell it to morons for big $$$$ then we can FTX it up fuckin in the bahamas with uggos!". It's the sort of obvious conflict of interest that they all try and bullshit their way out of -- one that typically doesn't exist in fiat setups, due to the multiple layers, and the role most govs fill in regulating things.

Crime.

It si great for taking sucker’s money.

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.

Very low fee cross-border (remittance) transfers using stablecoins (cryptoassets that are pegged to a fiat currency like the dollar) allow people to avoid getting ripped off by companies like Western Union.

On crypto platforms like Ethereum that support smart contracts (basically computer programs that run on the blockchain and allow you to automate transfers etc), you can provide liquidity to money markets and asset exchange platforms and earn many times the interest yield (APY) of what you might get at a bank for a similar thing (like 12-60% vs 2-5%). If you’re a real finance nerd you can also access various exotic financial instruments on other platforms that otherwise wouldn’t be available to you unless you were at a huge investment bank or hedge fund and even some that aren’t possible there. These are often called DeFi platforms (Decentralized Finance)

Another huge use of crypto networks are money laundering and scams though so beware. It’s still a largely unregulated black market. Never put more money into a crypto network than you can afford to lose.

you can buy web hosting or make donations without revealing your identity

Heating.

But resistive electrical heating is slightly more efficient. Heat pumps are considerably more efficient.

So - buying drugs.

Money laundering and gambling mostly

Is a question still rhetorical if you're wrong? Because you absolutely can buy a pizza and pay bills with it, you've been able to for years. You can also get paid in it, you've been able to for years.

Just because you choose not to, doesn't mean you can't.

Sure! you can buy lots o things with it, if going through gift cards is ok for you. websites like coinsbee or bitrefill allows you to buy:

• videogames (steam, keyshops etc)
• fuel
• traveling (trains, airplanes)
• food (various supermarkets)
• clothes

and more. I personally tried only videogames and amazon but it worked for me. i have a gift card for IKEA but still need to test it.

Also you don't need to give data aside from a mail so it's pretty private

Buying drugs

To be fair all it takes is for enough entities to exchange it between other assets. If you are in Europe, most stores won't sell you anything for your USD unless you exchange it into euros (except some edge cases), so it does feel kinda similar in that sense except cryptos don't really have a "home" country where they're universally accepted (bar some nations whose own currency has so throughly failed they adopted it).

There are some services which allow you to spend crypto by simply doing the exchange for you at the point of purchase into whatever currency the store uses (similar to visa/MasterCard/your bank doing this if you pay by card abroad).

I'll say ultimately though it doesn't change a lot, the idea of crypto is great and there are some where the implementation actually yields something that could be a better money (truly yours, not controlled by a government or a company necessarily, low fees, near instant transactions), but in the end there are just too many of them and they rock the boat too much for the well established financial institutions that they're just doomed IMO.

However, the technology itself I expect will end up being used against us by the ruling class in the coming years (i.e crypto currencies controlled by the government where they can set whatever rules they want on it).

I don't think this community is meant for rhetorical questions.

Crypto is mostly useful for extralegal activities.

You can technically donate for some services with it, but to acquire crypto you need to either KYC to some exchange which isn't not only a massive pain, but there are very serious privacy implications with it. Or you can acquire it via other means which means you will be buying it at high prices.

Also note that most cryptocurrencies aren't anonymous, every transaction is public in the block chain and can be traced back to you.

So if you really know what you're doing you can use privacy coins as a tool to transfer money anonymously, but that's pretty much it's only real world application.

Also, from what I understand (I'm no cryptographer) cryptocurrencies use public key cryptography so quantum computers may in the future break all cryptocurrencies and well deanonymise all previously anonymous privacy coins transactions stored in the blockchains.

You can donate to private trackers with it, they already figure out how to convert it to fiat and take care of hosting

The most famous transaction was for pizza. Your question is disingenuous baiting.

Cryptocurrency is a decentralized digital currency, it can be used for the same thing as any other digital currency, the difference being that you can use it without relying on a centralized authority like a bank or similar financial institutions.

Yes you can buy pizzas with it, although that's less common nowadays because there are more practical ways to pay for that and you probably don't mind the bank and government to know you buy pizzas.

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.

You don't? If I were to offer you 1BTC for your mouse, would you accept it? If you say no you're stupid, if you say yes you confirmed you see it as valuable and are willing to exchange it for goods directly.

Gambling.

It’s a technology that allows you to verifiably possess a definite quantity of “a thing.” That thing is just virtual.

Think of it this way: shares in companies are also virtual things. You can’t build a bridge out of em.

But a stock exchange is there to sell them to you and they will keep track that yes, you do actually own X shares of company Y.

Instead of issuing shares on a stock exchange to raise money, a new company could just sell shares of itself by creating a new crypto. There would be a finite number of “coins” representing ownership shares. The company could control whether more can be created. And it would be verifiable who owns what.

So that verifying and quantity-control are both features of the software itself. You could say it’s good for those things. As I illustrated above, this could be used to virtualize ownership of something, including the buying and selling of shares of it.

It's good for buying things online when your bank has an overly strict fraud detection system that blocks legitimate purchases because the seller is in a different country or whatever.

Please read https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/attack-of-the-50-foot-blockchain-bitcoin-blockchain-ethereum-smart-contracts

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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