> Combined they're sitting at ~$165 billion dollars in created value.

Huh? Bitcoin and Ehtereum are purely speculative assets, they have not enabled any new production or efficient distribution, they have not increased economic activity. They aren't even marginally useful in electronics production like gold is.

This is like saying printing dollars creates value (though the dollar is at least useful as an instrument of trade).

> they have not enabled any new production or efficient distribution

You know of another way to transfer massive amounts of money around the globe without middle men? This claim that cryptocurrency offers no value is completely ignorant of the most basic and fundamental properties of the technology.

You do need middlemen. The middleman is whatever service you must use to convert btc or eth to local currency which will actually be accepted for payments.

No. You don't need "local currency". With widespread adoption you can just pay sellers directly with cryptocurrency.

You just moved the goalpost by miles.

The question is whether Bitcoin and Ethereum have provided value. "Have" means in the past up to and including the present.

You are implicitly agreeing with the statement that Bitcoin is only speculative, by admitting that it will only be useful without middlemen in a hypothetical future where it achieves wide adoption.

Nope. In reality, the tax office comes along, demands to see the seller’s records, and if they haven’t kept comprehensive records of all transactions and the fair market value of the coins at transaction time in local currency, then they get fined, or if they’ve been actively evading tax, jailed. Plus, even if they’ve kept records perfectly, they need to get local currency at tax time in order to pay their tax bill.

Bitcoin is useless for any legitimate business. The costs of using it vastly exceed any benefits.

A lot of dopes who think they’re smarter than the tax-man because they’ve been evading taxes by using bitcoin are going to have a ‘Martin Shkreli’ moment in the next few years.

It can be good for speculation/investment and that's legal and kind of legitimate.

And unless you're selling drugs or malware, you can't do that.

> You know of another way to transfer massive amounts of money around the globe without middle men

No, because I have to go through various middlemen to transfer Bitcoin and turn them into real money.

There is no new value created there, it's just transferred from the buyer to the seller (with some being diverted as transaction costs).

Market cap in no way equates to "created value"

Sure it does. It's created a ton of value for myself and anyone else who didn't buy during a peak.

If I buy a grain of sand off of a beach for $1, the market cap of that beach is trillions of dollars. That doesn't mean the beach produced trillions of dollars.

Playing roulette can create value too, if you're lucky enough.