I wasted years of my life in crypto

It is basically a big game of hot potato. If you are OK with that, fine, but you are still just gambling on a party game chip.

There is a little bit of real value in having a rail that is hard to block, so you can move money across borders or around account freezes, sanctions, or runaway inflation. But that probably only justifies a tiny slice of the current price.

Most of the rest is speculation.

Fiat is different. A national currency is tied to the economy that uses it. Wages, rent, groceries, taxes, all live in that unit. Even if it crashes on FX markets you can still use it inside that country to buy local goods and services, and over time prices and wages shift along with it. The currency may fall against the dollar, but the local cost of living in that currency moves with it too.

The dream was that crypto gets adopted economically in a similar fashion, and even globally, that simply didn't happen, so it ended up just being gambling.

Yes, gold is very similar, but it has the benefit of being centuries old and not dependent on complex infrastructure.

Specifically, there is value in a global peer to peer and agreed upon standard of exchange of a guaranteed scarce resource that can't be double spent, such as gold and some cryptos.

Imagine a war, a natural catastrophe, societal collapse or upheaval.

You have to pack up, go elsewhere, or you're suddenly occupied.

Basically you have to ask yourself, what's more likely to be worth something in the future or elsewhere that I can park my money into until I need it?

Since Gold has such a history of being accepted by various cultures and people around the world, and it is very resilient, it doesn't require power, infra, computers, nodes, won't get easily destroyed to environmental incidents, can be stashed away for centuries without degrading, etc. It is arguably more likely to still be used as an exchange of value in the future.

Crypto, well, you have to be specific, let's say Bitcoin BTC, how likely is it that your wallet on your hard drive if you migrate from a war and find yourself in a new world order at the other end of the world, you can still use them to trade for goods/services and they're worth close too or more of what they were before?

It's hard to predict, but arguably it seems less resilient than Gold and therefore less likely for it to hold its value over time. That said, it may still appear better than USD, Euros, or shares in some company, etc.

That's why people say BTC is a "store of value", like gold. You use it to stow away value for when you need it later (even generations later), because it appears to be good at holding value even through geopolitical shifts, passage of time, and so on.

But, if people aren't actually using it for storing value, but instead for speculative bets, it means they are taking money out of it and not leaving it in, it becomes volatile, and volatility is a bad "store of value", because when you might need the value if it's at a "low" it's gone, and it failed at the use case.

If you go outside BTC, it becomes even less likely the other cryptos are good stores of value, and more and more they become speculative bets and a game of chicken.

And even BTC has high volatility and is used for speculative bets a lot. And gold isn't immune to his either.

There's no good answer here, nobody knows the future for sure, but that's the idea.

When people defend crypto as a store of value, now you know what they mean. They're basically hoping it'll hold value through borders, time, and so on.

> Fiat sometimes doesn’t protect you, but crypto NEVER does, and CAN’T, even in principle.

You're selling your old PC. The buyer pays you with Paypal or a check or some other digital fiat transfer, you give them possession of the PC, then they reverse the charge and steal your money.

That's the thing cryptocurrency protects you from, in the same way and for the same reason as cash does. And if the fiat system would provide that over the internet -- irreversible anonymous cash transfers -- then cryptocurrency would be a lot less useful. But it doesn't, so it's not.

Edit: Nope, I do not think that I am gonna work on something like stablecoin or crypto related. Let me try to clarify, I was looking at how people create their own cross platform chain just out of curiosity regarding stablecoins and then I saw a crypto gambling token and that tilted me so hard...

Everything started making sense. The first and foremost use of crypto is gambling. Everything else is a rather side effect of it (like me being 17 being able to pay via crypto)

I feel like some/most crypto might prey on the weak and gullible who can be going through things financially maybe by gambling as in trading or literal gambling... and then make their lives even more bad too and now I understand what the author actually meant, I think I was interested to see if its an industry worth working in but in my honest opinion right now not really...

Unless, I can work with something which can make me more traditional finance and give me regulations, maybe having stablecoin then can be fine but even then I genuinely do not think so that I am a guy who wants to work in or create a place and then create all these regulations and similar... I find this whole thing pointless from my perspective as a developer.

Most crypto can be used to be unregulated, gambling, piracy etc. and I think have a very high abuse factor too...

It was very interesting but I was just trying to spend some time I guess just seeing how people made chains but nope, I do not know but I am deeply offended by these gambling companies and exchanges too who are for traders who most likely lose their money in this weird shit show most of the times.

I think um the solution personally is that I always liked the idea of paying for servers anonymously, hosting anonymous contact so that you can say things against govt lets say if govt becomes too authoritative etc. but the problem is that this is also an side product and I doubt how many things need it. France actively went against grapheneos but couldnt do nothing I guess except have them move their servers and there are many many server providers who can even understand situations and maybe having a better connection or understanding with server providers can help out more.

World GDP is >$100T/year. What percentage of that does something have to be used for before it's worth something?