[smcl]

If a snarky YouTuber doing the “this one time at bandcamp” voice is the best argument, I dunno what to tell you. To borrow his condescending tone, he is making the argument “you think line go down, but line go up!” the latter half of which is the title of Dan Olsen’s high-profile video of the cryptocurrency boom.

Unless it becomes practical to pay for something with cryptocurrencies (which for me should be the primary use case of any currency) they basically seem used by people who want to time buys and sells according to the current boom/bust or pump/dump cycle.

[px43]

For millions of people, crypto-currencies are the most convenient way to buy lots of things. I've been buying things regularly with cryptocurrencies since 2011. Domain names, video games, hosting, consumer electronics, clothing, airfare, etc.

2017 marked a pivotal point where Bitcoin specifically abandoned catering to the brick and mortar and e-commerce use cases, and started focusing on large scale financial services. It was a frustrating development for sure, but people all over the world are using various smaller cryptocurrencies to buy groceries every day.

Cryptocurrencies might not be useful for you specifically, and that's fine. Maybe you're not one of the various under-served target demographics. Complaining about that though is a bit like complaining that Yen is useless because you live in the US and none of the businesses you frequent accept Japanese currency. It's undeniably a trillion dollar global economy that provides a massive amount of value to millions.

[smcl]

Well that's kind of a bad comparison, since Yen isn't my local currency and yet it has been useful to me when I was visiting Japan. I could buy it for a reasonable price in my current country, in basically any airport or bureau de change around the world. I could easily withdraw Yen from an ATM when in Japan, could buy things anywhere in the country with Yen and then switch back the couple-thousand I couldn't spend at Duty Free when I returned home.

Hearing that crypto may not be for me is quite surprising. It is advertised to me all over the place and the various stereotypical "cryptobros" seem curiously keen on people like me buying into the ecosystem, and appear to be very generously interested in helping me go "to the moon" etc. I've no idea how you're doing those things with crypto. I guess you have to go pretty far out of your way to buy, for example, airfare with a cryptocurrency or make otherwise really inconvenient trade-offs. I guess you might be semi-forced to use it due to, for example, living in a country with a currency which is more unpredictable than BTC then I think that's more of an black mark against the local currency than it is a feather in BTC's cap...

[px43]

> I guess you have to go pretty far out of your way to buy, for example, airfare with a cryptocurrency or make otherwise really inconvenient trade-offs.

Eh, not that hard really. Expedia started accepting Bitcoin in 2014.

https://www.expedia.com/Checkout/BitcoinTermsAndConditions

> "cryptobros" seem curiously keen on people like me buying into the ecosystem, and appear to be very generously interested in helping me go "to the moon" etc

Yeah fuck those people. I've been in the space since 2009 and I've never once recommended to any friends or family to invest in cryptocurrencies, and in my experience, the vast majority of people in the space are the same way. The "get rich quick" types who treat all of life like one big MLM have always been reviled, but none of that is unique to cryptocurrencies. Shady hucksters and con men have always existed, and always will.