Technology

It's easy to transfer to other countries. Ever tried to send $20 to another country like Kazakhstan? It's a nightmare

I used to buy a lot of pizza and burgers with bitcoin when I did night shifts. Still use it to buy electronics at least once a month.

It's also the best way to donate to nonprofit projects. I can just send ~ $10 of value, one time. No need to risk accidentally signing up for a monthly subscription or being bombarded by spam.

If you don't keep 100% of your monthly budget in BTC, you don't really care about the volatility either, because long term it always goes up.

Crypto (ETH and the like) is useful for it's protocol, you can build projects on it.

Bitcoin is a good store of value, and with lightning payments starting to be accepted it could be a good way to pay for goods and services. The third world is currently using lightning to circumvent inflationary currency swings.

It was great to trade and move value around. You could send to other countries, or do work for it. But Bitcoin fucked it all by basically being a ponzi scheme. People below will talk about it and how it holds or increases in value. Thats because most people are still buying in and hording it. Making it terrible as a currency.

I never bought crypto, I only traded, bartered, worked for it. I never put it on an exchange or used another company. Another sink of value and a stupid place to keep it. But that is the vast majority of people now.

So it is not good for anything anymore. Except speculation and hoping your are not the last holding the bag.

It's a really good way to bribe politicians and public figures.

Yes. Can you imagine my surprise when my drug money suddenly became mainstream? You could also buy weapons and order an assasin online.

It's not untraceable, but it's way more anonymous for routine purchases than CC. Also with all the nonsense the CC companies are pulling lately, it's a nice example of why de-centralized, unbanked fiat has real value. Personally I use it for search engine subscriptions and paying VPN fees with at least a layer of "hey, you can't sell my demographic data or send me junk mail" privacy. Also if you want to send money to someone without using venmo type garbage, it's super easy and flexible even if you don't have the same type of crypto as the person you are sending to. It's huge for sending money internationally as there are big fees associated with international money brokers when involving traditional fiat.
The mantra of crypto as a scam is wrong. It's just seriously overvalued and has been turned into scam as an investment commodity. The technology itself, at least modern scalable versions that don't require AI level nuclear power plants to scale, is not flawed. The fact that the archiac unscalable bitcoin prototype is still the most valued is a great example of the mismatch between real world value and the fucked up crypto marketplace.

If things go as they do, then it'll be your only option soon to pay for porn.

Yes. There are a few legitimate non gambling non crime uses. But those are typically very minor transactions. The problem is that it is somewhat anonymous and not refundable. It turns out that we really do want those features for almost all medium-high price purchases. Otherwise the thieves and scam artists will jack our shit.

Monero is good for completely private and secure transactions. People often use it to buy drugs online... From what I've heard.

Maybe if you want to buy something visa, Mastercard, and Christian nut jobs don’t want you to have. Otherwise it’s a total scam.

Didn't Newegg have some kind of crypto payment option? Do they still have it?

It was supposed to be the very thing that Paypal become (probably why Elon hedged his bet on it after getting kicked) but it became so inefficient with expensive transaction fees that everyone turned it down. As a consequence, it became a worse version of the stock market.

Mind you, this was before we even before we knew about the environmental damage.

Sui specifically is a unique horse in this race, as they are trying to really push for zero knowledge/trust models as well as what is known in cryptography spaces as multi party computation.

What this all effectively means long term is several things

• moving between one cryptocurrency on one chain to another can be done without trusting a 3rd party 'bridge'
• you still retain control of your assets on cryptocurrency exchanges utilizing the tech instead of trusting some 3rd party like Coinbase or Charles Schwab to fulfill their end of the bargain
• with the raise of the bs porn ID laws, this tech coupled with the unique dynamic NFTs sui has could generate you a proof token that has your personal info hidden after verifying with some trusted company handing these token out and being able to use them at sites to prove you are an adult without revealing your name.

The problem with all of this of course is it is very new tech, and it's hard to break into a space that's littered with scammers running pyramid schemes or just pulling the rug out from under people and running with the money.

The tech is there to eliminate a lot of unnecessary middle men in the financial world, but like all shiny new things, it is still lacking mass adoption and formal govt rules around it. This greatly limits the utility of this for the common man to just sending money to friends who have an exchange to cash them out or just paying for things visa won't let you, like Pornhub or something.

You can anonymously buy things on the dark web with monero. I've been looking to buy gift cards so I can purchase things anonymously. I believe you can even pay for Mullvad with monero