• NateNate60@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      19 hours ago
      1. You’re a criminal who wants to evade tracking by law enforcement
      2. You live in a country subject to sanctions and need to move a large sum of money transnationally
      3. You are the tinfoil-hat type who doesn’t trust Government-issued money for one of many real or imagined reasons
      4. You want to make digital purchases while staying relatively anonymous
      5. You’re a gambler who went all-in on crypto and are hoping it will increase in value later on
      6. You just think it’s more fun to pay with futuristic magic Internet money (yes, some people actually do it for this reason)
      7. You are a business in a (the) country whose laws legally require the acceptance of Bitcoin
    • Shayeta@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      1 day ago

      No bank or goverment can control it. It is the benefit of being able to send money to anyone around the world while maintaining ownership of your money as if it were cash in hand.

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        7 hours ago

        That is exactly the problem. It has no real value as the entire thing is propped up by chaos. It could be worth a trillion dollars one day and then nothing the next.

      • ynthrepic@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 day ago

        Banks or governments as opposed to who though? There’s a reason we usually want those publicly owned and regulated institutions to handle our transactions. Obviously, it depends what country you live in, and what currency you’re talking about. But I don’t think Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency actually solves the problem it purports to.

        • Semester3383@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 day ago

          Ideally, no one controls it. It’s just exists as a medium for exchange.

          There are both good and bad points to currency have value that can be adjusted by gov’ts; crypto currency solves one set of problems, but has it’s own, inherent issues.

          • ynthrepic@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            20 hours ago

            You’re not really selling it for me, which I guess is the point aye? 😂

            What I imagine as ideal is an open-source and transparent bank and payment system that issues its own currency backed by ties to its investment portfolio that is properly regulated by its host country. i.e. you would use their currency to trade among others on the platform according to the percentage value of their portfolio that you own as measured by the currency to which you which to convert your holdings for a given purchase. You could select different tiers of risk if you’d like your “savings” to grow in value over time but experience potential dips or even loss of value if there is major market stability.

            I am not an expert on such things, but this at least has real links to tangible asset worth, and isn’t based on the artificial scarcity of an increasingly unsolvable math problem.

      • AppleTea@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        19 hours ago

        Until some guy in LA hires a bunch of moonlighting police officers to steel your laptop

      • Auli@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        24 hours ago

        To an extent cryptos only value is it can be turned into currency.

      • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        24 hours ago

        And therefore no recourse if you are robbed, scammed, etc. Try going to your local, or even federal authorities and explain to them that you lost the digital equivalent of $10000 and they won’t do a thing.

    • Pup Biru@aussie.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 day ago

      i do think they hold some value for things like bank to bank, where each party is kiiiiind of untrusted and unrelated (not on a public chain - it’s just a private consensus between collaborating parties)

      it also undeniably provides payment outside of standard card networks and the finance sector (people have been using crypto to buy drugs for decades now), so can be used to circumvent things like this mastercard/visa morality police garbage… i think in that, it’d be useful to have a strongish cryptocurrency somewhere at least to be able to provide uncensorable competition (the alternative to that being some global EU network that everyone accepted in the same manner)

      but i think the value in blockchain in general is minimally about currency: that was just the first implementation… it’s a distributed, trustworthy log between untrusted individual entities. the benefits of that are honestly pretty niche, but i think it does solve some valuable problems… just most people should never even know that blockchain was involved