It’s good for losing a bunch of money.
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Kind of like fiat currency
bold of you to assume that anyone outside of the Epstine class is holding enough cash for that to matter
assume? do you think we don't have access to the data???
It's great for being paid while working abroad.
Nope
you can buy web hosting or make donations without revealing your identity
Crime.
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.
r/buttcoin
hehe... "butt"
It si great for taking sucker’s money.
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.
These are the types of examples used, but I don’t not think it is actually good for these uses. If your account is hacked and someone takes the crypto, there is no way to reverse the transaction, now what the hackers own your company? If you can invalidate the shares and reissue new ones, then owning the crypto is not actually ownership of the company.
Even without theft what do you do when people simply lose access to their wallets. Maybe because they forget their password or they die and they never gave their heirs the information.
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.
Maybe I phrased the OP poorly. The "can you buy a pizza" was rhetorical. The "is crypto good for anything." wasn't, though I suppose that was also poorly worded. I know people buy drugs with it etc, so it's used for something other than just speculation.
Heating.
But resistive electrical heating is slightly more efficient. Heat pumps are considerably more efficient.
So - buying drugs.
and Senators
Money laundering and gambling mostly
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
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.
The most famous transaction was for pizza. Your question is disingenuous baiting.
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.
_ /\ _
That's not true, Steam stopped accepting Bitcoin because of the large transaction fee and value volatility. Here's the news from when they did that https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1464096684955433613 in case you don't believe someone who was buying games with BTC on Steam back then.