[pfisch]

Or is it for having your money retain value in a country with high inflation and/or bad economic conditions and capital controls?

[martin8412]

Put dollars into your mattress then. That's more secure. The value should be denominated in USD anyway, but in many cases isn't. Often the price is listed as BTC/USDT with USDT being yet another shady enterprise where part of the financial backing is from the value of BTC.

[pfisch]

Lots of countries have capital controls that make it hard to get access to dollars. Especially countries with high inflation.

Why are you talking about usdt? The price of usdt has always been the same as usd and no one is forced to use usdt. This seems irrelevant.

[owlbite]

Well apart from when the 15 or so times in the past few years where the value of usdt wasn't the same as usd... https://protos.com/history-of-tethers-peg-every-time-usdt-tr...

[pfisch]

This just isn't super relevant to the discussion. Tether is a scam, ok, I think everyone agrees about that.

So don't use it.

[LegitShady]

without the illegal use cases to pump up the value of the coin, you're basically converting your currency to digital IOUs that fluctuate in price and there's no reason for them to have any value at all. The thing that gives all of these coins values is speculation due to all the scams and illegal money moving.

[pfisch]

The far majority of the value in gold is essentially speculation as well, so I don't see a big difference.

[LegitShady]

one is a non expiring real world good with uses outside of speculation, and the other is a digital certificate of ownership of a number on a blockchain. If you truly cannot see the difference between the two, no one can help you.

[pfisch]

I agree those are differences. I don't agree that the source of the valuation of these goods has anything to do with the differences you listed.