Crypto is opting out of real money is the same way buying an unstable stock is. People are buying it hoping to get rich and convincing others to do the same, hoping they’ll sell it off before the price crashes and it’s completely worthless. Nobody is buying milk and eggs with GameStop stocks or *coins, and if they did, it’d make international news and that singular event would be referenced for 5 years by supporters as an example of how “real” their currency is.
Cryptocurrencies are indeed traded like meme stocks — their value is 100% based on narrative. The difference is meme stocks can’t be electronically transacted sans trusted third parties, which if you recall from the 2009 Satoshi paper, is the entire point of Bitcoin.
(There are other benefits to having a global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms, e.g. transparent supply metrics.)
> hoping they’ll sell it off before the price crashes and it’s completely worthless
What are the holders of Bitcoin supposed to sell it for, exactly? USD is being inflated. The stock market is insane. Housing is insane and comes with tax and maintenance liabilities virtually everywhere. Artwork is physical and illiquid. Government debt is increasingly dubious.
It would take governments becoming fiscally responsible and a return to a gold standard for Bitcoin to become less societally relevant. And even then, gold and gold-backed government monies would suffer from transparency issues and not being able to be electronically transacted sans trusted third parties.
I’m afraid there’s really just no good news here for people who refuse to invest in Bitcoin on general principle.
Which is in practice really no different from meme stocks today.
Meme stocks which are only transactable via trusted third parties and are inherently trapped inside the walled gardens of various centralized brokerage firms.
Conversely, Bitcoin can be self-custodied with FOSS, and is trivially spendable via TTPs and L2 protocols. But yes, in practice people are using cryptocurrencies as speculative stores of value almost exclusively.
But in the long run, it's not.
There are no cryptos which effectively server as either currencies or good stores of value. There are always many better alternatives in both cases.
If you want to opt out of currency - that's rational - you can buy land, low-overhead ETFs, indexes, bonds, gold, other currencies, Gold, commodities, and all of the above.
Consider the obvious problem with your stated benefits of crypto: for every supposed benefit, there are already other, better solutions.
The only thing crypto can do, that others cannot, is make you rich, quickly, by doing nothing, by getting others in to the pyramid.
In the long run, crypto has a role, but there's no crypto on the horizon that's really useful. Some day.
What’s the average PE ratio up to now on the S&P?
Land, where? Real estate is just as inflated as the stock market if not moreso; it also comes with a tax liability at minimum, and is far less liquid than equities, cash and cryptos.
PMs are no different from cryptocurrency in any meaningful respect, and are actively worse on many fronts — e.g. where do you custody it, how do you verify it, how do you exchange it easily, how do you prevent it from being seized or stolen.
Look, there’s a reason humans invented fiat currency. It would just be better if that currency were A) global, B) of fixed supply, and C) controlled by computer algorithms instead of political institutions.
> Consider the obvious problem with your stated benefits of crypto: for every supposed benefit, there are already other, better solutions.
That’s mostly true of non-money — read: non-bearer asset — use cases, like those epitomized by Ethereum and its many competitors.
(But even offline, gold transactions would require a great deal of care wrt anti-counterfeiting, and this is an edge case given gold’s primary use is as a speculative store of value.)
