… the founding ideas are promising, and something I dream of.
Before I start, just a little bit of background on me so you can understand how biased I am (😅): I’m a 16 years old programmer and I won a few crypto hackathon/funding rounds and I made a lot of friends in the field. It allowed me to get quite a bit of ETH/XMR along the way!
I see cryptocurrencies getting a lot of hate, rightly so for the number of scams, shitcoins, NFTs bullshit, “governance”, DAOs and all those often useless & snob terms.
However the founding ideas of decentralisation and freedom with your money are very appealing to me. Smart contracts are really interesting for creating your own banking operation and tokens can represent anything! It’s a world of possibilities to play with, and you get to build something useful for people!
I’d just like to add a bit of nuance tho: I see a lot of apps being built and what’s really making me laugh is the lack of open-source, decentralisation and auditing on privacy. Granted, there is a lot of fake promises, but it’s like everything, you have to find the talented people to follow.
I find it fascinating to build unstoppable, decentralised, user-first apps. I just hope that web3 stays true to its founding principles.
Hope it was interesting, tell me what you think!
EDIT: title+typos+the game is not comfortably played in Act 2
☎️ Right now: take some banknotes stamped by the US Federal Reserve, and your landlord will… be maybe reluctant (was it “guilty cash” from drug trafficking? can’t risk it)… and instead ask you to call your bank so they change the numbers they got stored on yours and your landlord’s computer ledgers.
If you both would rather trust the computer ledgers of Bitcoin, DOGE, aETH tokens on the AAVE DAO, or whatever crypto PayPal has concocted recently, that’s your choice. You could pay it in Robux, or give them your PS5, or some NFT pointing to a gif of a poorly drawn ape, for all it matters.
Still better have them sign a recept in either case, though.
Right now, the only thing you need Monopoly™ USD in the US, is paying US taxes. You can pay them in Monopoly™ EUR in most of the UE, or Monopoly™ RUB in Russia… but some landlords, and even grocery stores, may still ask you for Monopoly™ USD or Monopoly™ EUR because they don’t trust whatever Monopoly™ money their government is asking for 🤷
So in other words, no. Nowhere.
People in 1st world countries are tapping smartphones because they trust the NFC to talk to a wallet they trust to connect to a server they trust to change numbers on a digital ledger they trust.
Whether the screen shows you the equivalent value in USD, BTC, or barrels of oil, you already trust digital Monopoly™ money to get from one place to another.
None of the other things you mentioned have 5% price swings every single day. It’s a mere facade of a currency fit for insane people
Not sure which things you think have, and which ones don’t, “5% price swings every single day”, or price in what, but if you check the markets, you might get surprised by how stable some things are, and how unstable others.
The value of USD has decreased by about 10% over 2 years. Over the same time period, BTC has been half and more than double its current value – a factor of 5 spread. Oil varied by a factor of 2, copper a factor of 1.5. Eggs a factor of less than 3.
Things which vary that much can make useful commodities but are terrible currencies. You have accidentally given BTC a sick burn, since anyone who tried to pay their rent in crude oil would likewise be laughed at.
Kind of the opposite:
Gold is a special case of commodity that doesn’t degrade over time, so its value doesn’t reduce intrinsically, only extrinsically through how much people are willing to give for it. It still doesn’t benefit from high volatility, particularly if you intend to use it as a store of value.
But most importantly: value is not intended to be stored long term at all. Since it comes from demand, which is only short term (compared to investment), any mid and long term value expectation is pure speculation. It seems like the last 15 years with the post-subprime and COVID stimulus of 0% and below-0% interest rates, have made people forget the basics: money needs to flow, use it or lose it.
You just did an excellent job of explaining why BTC is no good as a currency, thank you
Are you sure it wasn’t the opposite?.. Nah, scratch that, I think I’ll leave it here. Seems like you have your beliefs, and I’m not going to shill one kind of Monopoly™ money above another.