[hurril]

Holding stock in a company (for instance via en index fund) is not a fiat holding. The fact that it is commonly priced in terms of fiat currency is not any different that the fact that BTC is too.

Neither of them have to be. All exchanges take place in pairs; one holding is exchanged for another. Buying BTC with dollars is (USD, BTC); buying Microsoft is (MSFT, USD); buying EUR with dollars is (EUR, USD).

Nothing prevents you from pricing Microsoft stock in BTC or BTC in EUR or Etherium.

The holding as such, however, is only a fiat holding when it is in fact either a (wad of) cash equivalents and/ or a bank balance.

There isn't a person on earth for which there is only two types of relevant holdings, in either USD or BTC. A person that (seriously) considers acquiring a crypto holding, such as BTC, is most likely choosing between other crypto currencies, gold or silver, primarily. Even more likely, they're merely FOMO-speculating as a complement to plain stock holdings.

The fact that a number of you don't seem to understand this should call your competency into question.

[davidebaldini]

I believe the perception of this dichotomy is something of your own imagination. Anecdotally the term fiat is used exclusively in the context of crypto, but to the best of my understanding its usage doesn't imply that the sole alternative to fiat is BTC, or crypto. Rather, I believe the term solely carries a prejudice against money that is declared valuable as such by political authority rather than by its market adoption and de-facto usage.

[hurril]

How could that be of my imagination when it's used and liked in the parent to my comment? Everyone is a fiat holder but holding (not crypto) does not constitute being a fiat holder.

But yes, I agree with you about where fiat is used. It's almost always used by people that don't quite undersand the concept of value or that of money for that matter.

Money is not declared valuable by political authority. That is just not how it works. Crypto is what's declared valuable by fiat, ironically. Its value is described as derived in terms of a limited supply (it's just like Gold!)

Fiat currency derives its value from network effects, debts and the feeling of safety (or the lack thereof.)

[grey-area]

If BTC was valued based on actual real-world usage (as opposed to wash trading on exchanges and speculation), the value would be near 0.