It isn't money. Money can be easily exchanged for goods and services. It is a digital "asset" whose only meaningful application is speculative trading...of itself. If something only has value because you think you can sell it to the next sucker for more, it is a ponzi scheme.
Where does Amazon accept cash on delivery?
Also, by this logic Amazon accepts electronic cash that can be "bought" with crypto, right? Maybe dollars are just gift cards for bitcoin :P
> Cash on Delivery is available as a payment method for fulfilled by Amazon and some seller fulfilled items. If you have Gift Card balance in your account, you can redeem it and pay the remaining amount using Cash on Delivery payment method.
It’s quite easy to convert crypto into Amazon gift cards, which can then be used to buy stuff on Amazon. So it’s not exactly a big hop to go from crypto to Amazon.
Of course Amazon accepts cash. Cash on Delivery is one way. [1] Other ways are listed on Amazon's webpage entitled "Shop on Amazon, pay in cash". [2] Also, Amazon has teamed up with Western Union for your cash oriented shopping needs. [3]
A crypto exchange or vpn is not quite the same as a store that sells goods like groceries, clothes or electronics or services like a lawyer's time, a doctor's visit or a haircut. I don't see any mainstream websites listed on that website. Regular people are unable to use crypto as money for regular things.
VPN industry is multi-billion, crypto exchanges are multi-billion, hosting is multi-billion. These are real industries - I mean a lot of people on HN are employed in companies that support and provide data / server hosting.
It starts with digital services and it spiders out from there. Enthusiasts who own retail stores accept crypto as a novelty or marketing strategy, but in 25 years it could be much more common.
None of that actually applies to this discussion, which is about crypto not being money. The example given for crypto being money was a website that listed things that are not goods and services people use to live their lives. The goods that people use to live are not vpns and secret crypto exchanges but groceries, automobiles, clothing, doctor appointments, etc.
If you have some other list of goods and services that people can repeatedly and reliably purchase using crypto, you can provide that to show that crypto is money. The earlier list is almost entirely crypto exchanges and vpns, which is hardly a useful list of goods and services for normal day to day products that people use.
If you can't purchase goods and services with crypto, crypto is not money.
The first electric car was made over 100 years ago and they are still only a fraction of all the cars on the road. Revolutionary tech doesn’t always take over in 10 years let alone 100.
You're pushing a fake, invented history. Electric cars existed in the 1830's - about 200 years ago and 52 prior to gasoline powered cars. Electric cars were supplanted by gasoline powered cars. It's NOT that they just haven't caught on, yet.
> If something only has value because you think you can sell it to the next sucker for more, it is a ponzi scheme.
Careful with that sentence. It is applicable to paintings, stamps, and collecting in general. True that on those other cases you have a physical object, so it has a value (as opposed to nft) but usually it's far less. A Pokemon card costs almost nothing, but some people are willing to pay millions for it, so it "costs" millions.
Disclaimer: I still agree with your comment, I just think that the reason is more complex than that sentence.
This seems like a good point. I'm not sure I agree about paintings, but sure let's take Pokemon cards. These have only a little bit of intrinsic value - you can use them to play a game that is fun for 8 year olds. They only become more valuable because people speculate that their value may increase in the future. Why do they think that?
Well, it happened with baseball cards and comics, and then everything else. But let's go back to baseball cards. Why did some of them become so valuable? Just a guess but maybe its because they became rare, yet retained nostalgia value. Kids who bought them in the 20s and 30s treated them like the worthless scraps of cardboard that they were. Most were lost or destroyed. But decades later if they came across some they evoked a powerful emotion, maybe the sort of emotion I feel when see the login prompt on a Vic-20 maybe. So they started collecting them, and of course they had the most demand for the legendary players who they idolized as kids, so the value of those went up. After that, its mostly just people speculating. But there was a kernel of real value there to begin.
Stamps and other collections are fun to collect and to have, regardless of their monetary value. (After all, people collect otherwise-worthless things like bottle caps, too.)
Cryptocurrencies have no substance to them, they are not interesting to look at, and while I suppose one could get a thrill out of simply knowing one has them, I very much doubt that there's more than a tiny handful of people for whom that would remain true if they were worth $0.
> I very much doubt that there's more than a tiny handful of people for whom that would remain true if they were worth $0
By now they’re a part of our history. I keep a professionally made, empty paper wallet as a souvenir from the 2010s. It’s a lot more tangible than some scrap of paper with 24 random words on it.
And it is somehow 'money' only when it suits projects and places like HN. [0] I'm sure any of you would immediately rush to sell 299 Ethereum right now, even if it ran through a Tornado.cash mixer, otherwise you would leave it alone if you believe that it isn't money or worth anything.
> If something only has value because you think you can sell it to the next sucker for more, it is a ponzi scheme.
The very first comment on that use case is, "Please allow me to offer you a free rsync.net account, in perpetuity, for the backup portion of your requirements." [1] Saying that the use case for Monero is to compete with zero-cost services doesn't offer a compelling use-case for Monero.
> If something only has value because you think you can sell it to the next sucker for more, it is a ponzi scheme.
That's not what a ponzi scheme is.
In a ponzi scheme, there is a fictitious business model that's purported to be turning a profit, and its lack of profit is hidden by secretly using new inflows to pay off old investors.
In crypto, none of that is hidden. It's widely known that dollars cashed out by earlier investors come from the coffers of later investors. Since e.g. Bitcoin doesn't deceive people about being a profitable company, it's by definition not a ponzi scheme.
Edit: This is a discussion section. If you disagree with my comment, let's respectfully discuss it. I see a lot of voting and no replying.
You (but not many other people) can purchase liquor and sex, but you can't go to a grocery store the next morning and buy coffee for your hangover. You can't replace your totaled car that was lost during your escapades, either.
Since clearly you can buy things for Bitcoin, it is money.
You can speculate on the value of any currency. I’ve earned thousands extra this year by invoicing foreign currencies at the right time, at no loss of my customers.
Bitcoin only has value for me because of the things I can buy with Bitcoin. (Privacy preserving technology, online services, drugs, helping friends of friends get out of Ukraine.)
