You literally just gave the textbook definition of a currency. The only difference is that crypto isn’t backed by a government.
Crypto isn’t a currency, it’s a commodity for trading. One that doesn’t physically exist. In inherent use and no inherent value.
bhmnscmm@lemmy.world 9 months ago
parpol@programming.dev 9 months ago
[deleted]bhmnscmm@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I stand corrected. There is literally no functional difference between “currency” and (at least some) crypto.
agent_flounder@lemmy.world 9 months ago
How much energy is required for use of each?
xep@kbin.social 9 months ago
There is no reason for CBDC to use blockchain.
kirklennon@kbin.social 9 months ago
CBDC is blockchain based, i.e cryptocurrency.
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 9 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 9 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 9 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 9 months ago
Or if you pretended that material goods had an inherent value.
Varyk@sh.itjust.works 9 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.
snooggums@kbin.social 9 months ago
Pants can be what keeps you from freezing to death and going to jail.
Can be, but pants do not have inherent value in the context of a tropical climate where freezing is not an issue and nudity is allowed. They have contextual value.
Food does not have inherent value, it scales with availability and demand. An excess of apples that will spoil before they can be processed into something that can be consumed do not have inherent value.
This is important because while money's value is far more volatile, the argument that material goods have inherent value as a comparison is flawed.
pirat@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Pants can be what keeps you from freezing to death and going to jail.
Sounds like without pants, I’ll be freezing to death — then going to jail for that!
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 months ago
Pants can be what keeps you from freezing to death and going to jail.
This is still dependent on societal consensus. Well, the going-to-jail part, anyway. The protection from cold issue is dependent on the climate and time of year of where you happen to be located. There are many parts of the world where you could comfortably go naked.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 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 9 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 9 months ago
Does my grocery store or gas station accept it?
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 months ago
Does your grocery store or gas station accept Qatari riyals?
BleatingZombie@lemmy.world 9 months ago
If that were my local currency, then I’m sure they would
zergtoshi@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Just because it’s useless to you doesn’t mean it’s useless in general.
deafboy@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There is no such thing as inherent value.
S410@kbin.social 9 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 9 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 9 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".
darthelmet@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I mean sure. Anything someone is using like currency can be called currency. But we’re talking practical terms here. Things we “collectively agree to value.” My WoW gold might be useful for buying potions, but it’s not generally accepted anywhere outside that narrow context. The fewer people who are willing to accept the currency, the less useful, and arguably less “real” it becomes, in so far as currency is defined by its value to others. I could print “me bucks” that I value at $1B USD, but that doesn’t mean much if nobody will give me a sandwich for it.
frezik@midwest.social 9 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 9 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.
honey_im_meat_grinding@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
In the EU they’re getting a digital euro which allows them to avoid bowing down to Paypal, Payoneer, and all the services interlinked with them (e.g. Patreon) - the ancillary services can even offer digital euro payouts instead, too. So as long as what you’re doing is legal, you can break the Paypal/Payoneer terms of service as much as you want and avoid their privately enforced authoritarianism that goes beyond the scope of the law for whatever reason.
deafboy@lemmy.world 9 months ago
One failed bank NOT causing an international disaster is a good thing imho.