[jdnordy]

A key difference between collectibles and bitcoin/cryptocurrency is that collectibles don't claim to be money nor are they trying to replace current money systems. I'm no expert on money, how it works and how it gets value, but I would be interested to find an article discussing whether cryptocurrency has enough of the qualities of "money" to replace any current money system.

[darksaints]

The Hitachi Magic Wand never claimed to be a sex toy, and yet it is almost universally recognized as one. It doesn't really matter what is claimed...there are some cryptocurrencies that are technically better suited to currency use cases than Bitcoin, but they aren't popular enough to be used as a currency, so Bitcoin is still more of a currency than they are. Even Tide detergent can be recognized as a currency if enough people use it like one [0].

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies certainly share a lot of the properties of money: cleanly divisible, readily accepted as a medium of exchange, and difficult to counterfeit. But as much as it is used as a currency, there doesn't appear to exist much of a lending market (a key property of money), and there are tons of people that are sitting on it like an investor might sit on gold stockpiles or land, which makes me think the baseball card analogy is still appropriate.

[0] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/markets-in-everything-tide-la...