Yes, but in majority of cases you still need some legal entity that can convert crypto to fiat so you can actually buy stuff with real money. Would be enough to forbid that and crypto is pretty much done.
You're right, it's ALL fiat money. All money that has ever existed was fiat money, from shells and dollars to bitcoins and xbox points. IF it doesn't have INHERENT value as food, fuel, etc, then it's a fiat currency, it has value because we declare it to be so. Cryptocoins are the ultimate fiat because they don't even really exist.
In one sense, but scarcity does not equate value. Many things can be currency, but those with no inherent value, regardless of scarcity, when used as currency are fiat currency, literally valued only because we say so. Paper is a commodity, paper money is not. Oranges are a commodity, but are not a currency or particularly scarce. Computer bits are not scarce at all, and literally billions of copies of any bitcoin could be made, but it has no value that way, only if we all agree that the only person who owns a bitcoin is Jim over there. What's the difference between a bitcoin and a dogecoin? Virtually none, except people say bitcoin has a value.
Go ahead and copy bitcoin and see if it gets you anywhere (thousands have already tried).
What makes bitcoin valuable, other than having by far the best fundamental monetary qualities mankind has ever seen (and almost certainly will ever see), is its network effect. In order compete with bitcoin, an alternative would need to be significantly better.
> Go ahead and copy bitcoin and see if it gets you anywhere (thousands have already tried).
You seem to have missed the point of that paragraph. The second half of the statement was "but it has no value that way, only if we all agree that the only person who owns a bitcoin is Jim over there." The bitcoin itself is just a pointer to an entry in a ledger, and we all agree the abide by the ledger. Literally nothing is stopping anyone from forking BTC, copying the ledger, and assigning all the coins to themselves. I'm only prevented from SPENDING those BTC now because no one is going to just take my word for it, because no one has agreed to use my new ledger instead of the shared one. There's nothing that stops North Korea from printing lots of USD $100 bills, and they do it too. When we determine that a certain bill isn't printed by the US Gov't, we call it "counterfeit" and assign no value to it. My private ledger also is counterfeit and is deemed to have no value. Fake bills are harder to make, fake bits are trivial, it's the provenance of the blockchain that says they're real or fake, and human faith in the blockchain that allows us to assign value to BTC.
> What makes bitcoin valuable, other than having by far the best fundamental monetary qualities mankind has ever seen
Could you list what these are for me? I don't see cryptotokens have ANY value as actual money. I can't deny people feel they have thousands of dollars of value, but so do shares of Berkshire Hathaway, and that's not money, so I see them as more of a security crossed with a casino chip. As long as the casino is around I can cash it in, but I'm depending on that small group of people to make it have value. I can't take it to Walmart and spend it. How is a cryptotoken better than, for example, the US dollar?
> (and almost certainly will ever see),
I think claiming anything invented today will never be surpassed is unlikely to be true.
> is its network effect. In order compete with bitcoin, an alternative would need to be significantly better.
I would argue cash and gold are far better, and have effectively universal acceptance, far beyond the reach of cryptotokens. BTW has mindshare/name recognition among casino currencies, and is the easiest to convert between real currencies and back, but I can spend dollars and euros and gold at far more places than I can spend all the cryptotokens combined.
No fiat means by decree. Its used to differentiate money that takes equal or more work to create/issue (e.g. gold), from money whose issuance is controlled by the central banks who can create it out of thin air with little to no work.
No those currencies are called representative currencies - the electronic digits you receive represent entitlement to some commodity stored somewhere. With physical commodities that are difficult to audit, this system was abused which led us to where we are today with "money" that banks print/type out of thin air and charge interest on as if they'd worked for it.
We can use anything as money, but some things work better than others. Unfortunately fiat currency works terribly as can be seen in the downfall of the modern society in the west. It enables a massive transfer of wealth to the people closest to the money printer from the general population. Look up "Cantillon effect"
They're still fiat because we agree on the idea that the gold itself is valuable. I cannot eat gold, plant it, power my home with it, or marry it. A gallon of water will keep me alive longer than an ounce of gold.
I understand that in dictionaries and textbooks we've defined that gold has value, but I'm pointing out that it has value because we AGREE it does because it's semi-rare and hard to get. Palladium is rarer, but cheaper, it's not as fun or pretty as gold.