[moepstar]

You earn interest (varying) while you delegate the coins to a stake pool.

This is basically the same (details matter, ADA for example keeps the coins in the wallet all the time - AMP coins are transferred elsewhere) for all PoS (Proof of Stake) coins.

Bitcoin, on the other hand, is a PoW (Proof of Work) coin.

Edit since i can't reply downthread:

You're of course free to cash out your staking rewards however you want, but mind 2 things:

- taxes

- transfer fees

- the interest compounds..

[swarnie_]

Ok, that's fair enough but it still doesn't solve my original problem.

I still end up with more of the same asset with no intrinsic value.

I assume they aren't paying me out in GBP or freedom bucks?

[lhorie]

My understanding is that you can largely think about crypto in a similar way you think about regular currencies and economics: staking rewards are similar to governments printing money via bonds or whatever, there's an internal inflation rate etc, and the value of a currency relative to the rest of the world is to at least some degree related to its governance (but in the case of crypto, governance is restricted to the health of its own ecosystem only, rather than expanding to all industries like a regular country)

The main difference, to my understanding, is that rewards are kinda like getting paid directly by voting (in many cases, in a "republican" fashion via delegation), whereas with regular currencies, the mechanisms that correlate bond yield to economic activity are too complex and abstract for the average joe to grasp.