This is as useless as saying “fuck currency shit ffs”.
Except it’s not really a currency is it? Nobody actually uses this stuff for buying goods and services, they treat it as a stock. Usually short-term trading that’s essentially just gambling.
Normal currency also doesn’t use more than 2% of the power generation of a massive country.
People speculate on the price of "normal currency" too.
I’m well aware.
But far, far, far, far more people use it as currency. Exchanging it for goods and services is clearly the main use for it.
Crypto is used like a stock.
There are people who ride the bike as a means of transport. Then there are people who build their entire identity around riding a bike. That doesn’t mean one or the other rides it wrong.
A token of value can have multiple different usecases at the same time.
In addition to using it as a currency, sure. But as I asked rigatti, is that a problem? At worst one might perhaps argue that the name "cryptocurrency" is misleading, but I've never cared much about semantics like that.
But faaaarr fewer than those who use it for transactions. In the crypto world it’s reversed.
It is.
Yes, cryptocurrencies are used for buying goods and services.
Third, energy consumption is a great point if you ignore the material resource acquisition cost, worker cost, production cost, sundry cost, hardware cost, conventional debit and credit fees, service personnel cost, data centers, servers, and telecommunication network costs of conventional currency infrastructure.
Yeah, if we ignore all of that, then the resource consumption of a single energy intensive cryptocurrency seems high.
Yes, cryptocurrencies, aka “currencies”, are used for buying goods and services.
No no no. Cryptocurrencies aren’t used for buying goods and services outside of extremely fringe scenarios.
People trade them like they do stocks. You can pretend that’s not the case all you want, but you know it to be true.
I can’t go to Aldi and pay for my shopping with bitcoin or whatever shitcoin you hold. I can’t pay my bills with it. I can’t go get a haircut with it.
All I can do is treat it like a stock.
Energy consumption is a great point if you ignore the material resource acquisition cost, worker cost, production cost, sundry cost, hardware cost, conventional debit and credit fees, service personnel cost, data centers, servers, and telecommunication network costs of conventional currency infrastructure
I’m not ignoring any of that. Crypto still uses far more, and to top it all off, isn’t even used as a currency.
You cryptobros have been saying crypto will replace real currency any day now for years. It’s not happening. Sorry to burst your bubble.
Yes, you can buy groceries or a haircut with cryptocurrency.
Because most of them are less than a decade old, it isn’t as widespread as many more established currencies, but you can absolutely buy groceries by a haircut, eat at Burger King, buy a house, buy a car, pay utility bills, obviously pay for various forms of entertainment like twitch, newegg, there’s tons of stores that you can use cryptocurrency.
And you can also buy gift cards with cryptocurrency that you can use for literally anything obviously.
It’s fine if you don’t like it, but people are using it as a currency to purchase any type of material good you would purchase with conventional currency.
You keep throwing your tantrum about how cryptocurrency is going nowhere while it grows by 100 million per year and many of the world’s governments are developing and purchasing cryptocurrencies.
They’re probably developing those cryptocurrencies for fun, right?
It’s probably like that dumb digital debit and credit card system that came up within the '70s.
Total bullshit, credit and debit cards.
Good thing that credit rating system never caught on, huh?
Except it’s not really a currency is it? Nobody actually uses this stuff for buying goods and services
Except Montero
LOL wake me up when you’re circulating currency instead of just speculating against the bag holders.
Cryptocurrencies have uses beyond just currency.
Found a bag-holder.
You think that there are only two possible uses for these things, and if I'm not interested in one of them I must therefore be using it for the other? Pretty weak logic.
Pst. Pssst
Real currencies use significantly less power despite orders of magnitude higher transaction volumes. They also have physical exchange options that incur no transaction costs and require no digital infrastructure. Crypto is just bad as a currency.
Love to see some proof. Seems unlikely with the amount of necessary infrastructure, especially relative to ultra high efficiency cryptos.
What proof do you want? Real currency can be printed on paper or forged into coins, and then used until the physical medium wears out with zero electrical usage and zero transaction fees. No digital currency of any form can beat literally zero.
Literally zero.
Everybody keeps every dollar they own physically on them at all times.
These dollars do not have to be printed, the cotton does not have to be woven, the plastic does not have to be stamped, the dyes do not have to be mixed, nobody has to account them, nobody has to account for their storage, nobody is maintaining the number and circulating supply of them, nobody is regulating the distribution and influx through centralized institutions.
Sounds like a cakewalk.
Yes, all those dollars that get pulled out of the earth by the blood sweat and tears of miners?
What are you talking about. If there are coins that don’t need mining why are we wasting electricity (or anything really)on the ones that do.
?
I don’t get it, you sound combative but are reiterating my point.
Yes, all those dollars that get pulled out of the earth by the blood sweat and tears of miners?
You mean the nickel and copper mines?
Centralised banking Stockholm syndrome is real.
Don’t most crypto users use one of a handful of highly centralized exchanges anyways? Like sure you can self host everything, but you can do that with real money too, and most people don’t have the care nor the skill to do it.
Wodge@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Crypto isn’t a currency, it’s a commodity for trading. One that doesn’t physically exist. In inherent use and no inherent value.
S410@kbin.social 4 months ago
The vast majority of "real" currencies are fiat currencies and don't have inherent value or use either.
US dollar hasn't been backed by gold since 1971, for example.
The only reason money has any perceived value at all, is because it's collectively agreed to have some value. Just like crypto currencies.
darthelmet@lemmy.world 4 months ago
But this is actually why crypto isn’t a real currency: we haven’t collectively agreed to value it, or at least not in any way that makes it useful as a medium for exchange. Ironically it can’t possibly become a proper currency while speculators are making its price so volatile. The very act of investing in it is making it worthless.
S410@kbin.social 4 months ago
Anything can be a currency, if you use it as a currency. A currency is not defined by its ability to be exchanged for gas or used to pay taxes.
If children in some school start to exchange pogs for junk food or video game cartridges, the pogs become a currency. By definition. The fact that the use is clearly limited and the value is a subject to rapid change or speculation is irrelevant.
There isn't a single currency in the world the value of which is set in stone. There isn't a single currency in the world which is universally accepted. Just because there exist currencies linked to some of the strongest economies in the world, which are relatively stable and incredibly hard to affect the value of via speculation, doesn't mean they're immune to speculation. It also doesn't mean that any smaller currencies, be it currencies or small countries, crypto or pogs, are "not real".
frezik@midwest.social 4 months ago
But there’s so few uses of actually buying things with crypto. People don’t use it as a medium of exchange outside of illicit goods and money laundering. We’re more than a decade into this and using crypto to buy a pizza is still a novelty.
A major proof of this is that FTX collapsed and took a chunk of the crypto market out with it. The market at large shrugged this off. If it were actually linked in to the broader economy, then it would have had similar ripple effects to a major US bank failing.
S410@kbin.social 4 months ago
I, personally, use crypto to do art commissions (I'm an artist) and to pay my VPS's rent. Neither is an illicit good or related to money laundering.
And, honesty, it's pretty great, compared to alternatives.
Last time I've used PayPal, it decided to withhold the funds for a month, for whatever reason. Plus, the transaction fee was about a dollar.
Transferring the same amount of money via Monero is guaranteed take only about a minute or two to process, since a transaction in that system would never get withhold, plus the processing fee would be about a hundred times smaller.
deafboy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
One failed bank NOT causing an international disaster is a good thing imho.
bhmnscmm@lemmy.world 4 months ago
You literally just gave the textbook definition of a currency. The only difference is that crypto isn’t backed by a government.
parpol@programming.dev 4 months ago
“Crypto isn’t backed by a government”
“CBDC is a digital form of fiat—money that is issued by central banks. It is designed to be a digital representation of the country’s physical currency. Unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, CBDC is backed by the government and is legal tender.”
CBDC is blockchain based, i.e cryptocurrency.
Japan is developing a similar cryptocurrency as well.
bhmnscmm@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I stand corrected. There is literally no functional difference between “currency” and (at least some) crypto.
xep@kbin.social 4 months ago
There is no reason for CBDC to use blockchain.
kirklennon@kbin.social 4 months ago
A CBDC can be blockchain based, but almost none actually will be. China's isn't. Japan's CBDC is not. In the US, the Federal Reserve is still in early stages but I'm confident it won't use blockchain either.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The big difference is that crypto is “decentralized”. Traditional currency is, to some extent, controlled by a central bank. The CB seeks to ensure price stability.
Digital cash schemes are much older than bitcoin/crypto. It’s not “crypto” just because it’s digital money.
doylio@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Tbf, most money nowadays doesn’t physically exist nowadays. Only a tiny fraction of the “money” that is out there has a physical instantiation. Most of it is just numbers in bank servers
Varyk@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Sure, it’s like if you printed ink on paper and pretended it was equivalent in cost to material goods.
snooggums@kbin.social 4 months ago
Or if you pretended that material goods had an inherent value.
Varyk@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Pretense is not required for inherently valuable material goods.
Two sheets of cloth sewed together into pants provide protection, warmth, legal obedience.
Pants can be the difference between freezing to death and going to jail.
Ink stamped onto a piece of paper(or usually plastic)? A bunch of people with shared values have to agree that it means something, even though it inherently does not.
Carrying your stamped paper or plastic doesn’t mean you won’t freeze to death, starve to death, or anything else.
It’s only value is by societal consensus, which while valuable, is not inherent, as with certain material goods.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 4 months ago
Indeed. All "value" is ultimately something that is collectively decided upon by society. A chunk of rock could be worthless or worth billions depending on how much people want it.
zergtoshi@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Not all crypto are the same.
Nano has been designed as digital money.
It has no mining, 0 fees (none for transactions, none for opening accounts), finalizes transactions sub-second (typically), has no built-in throughput limits and works across (political) borders.
I’d say these attributes offer some use and value.
BleatingZombie@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Does my grocery store or gas station accept it?
FaceDeer@kbin.social 4 months ago
Does your grocery store or gas station accept Qatari riyals?
zergtoshi@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Just because it’s useless to you doesn’t mean it’s useless in general.
deafboy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
There is no such thing as inherent value.