Alright, so let's call them cryptotokens instead. I've always preferred that myself, it's a much more general description of what they do. It doesn't change what they are but if that term makes you happier we can go with that.
It renders it useless outside of as a bit of gambling on the side.
Hardly, there are lots of things you can do with these things. A ledger is more than just money, it's a database. You really can't think of useful things that could be done with a completely decentralized and permissionless database?
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 9 months ago
People don’t use bitcoin or other cryptocoins as a general purpose database. They use it as they’d use a stock.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 months ago
Bitcoin, no, because it's a hopelessly out of date blockchain that actively resists having new capabilities added to it. Ethereum, on the other hand, is designed that way from the ground up. Many of the other smaller but more modern blockchains are also like that.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 9 months ago
And yet they’re still used like a stock and you can’t really use them as a currency.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 9 months ago
You can't use them as a currency everywhere. But the same can be said for any other currency too. You can't use US dollars everywhere. You can't use Chinese Yuan everywhere. And so forth. A currency doesn't have to be universally accepted everywhere on the planet for every application before it's useful.
Regardless, I was talking about using Ethereum as a distributed database.