According to wikipedia, the global FX market alone accounts for $5.09 trillion dollars per day in transactions [0] in 2016. Global GDP clocked in at $75.4 trillion U.S. dollars in 2016 [1]. The FX market alone accounts for two orders of magnitude more transfers of value than global GDP...I'm sure if we started including stocks, futures, options, etc. the number would be even higher.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_market

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268750/global-gross-dome...

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if it was even lower. With the exception of "stunt purchases" I very rarely see any real use of any sort of cryptocurrency.

The Silk Road drove a fair bit of actual commerce (illegal though it may be) until it was shut down, judging from the amount of money Ross Ulbricht apparently made off of the transaction fees.

Most of the money is just moving for trading/speculation purposes, from one exchange to another, or from exchange to wallet and vice versa. And there is a lot of trading going on, so I don't know if looking at it in relative terms makes that much sense.

They are two separate use cases, and so far not that many people are using cryptocurrencies for payments. Even if the payments use case were to grow, I believe that the trading/speculation would grow even more, so the payments use case will keep being a small percentage, at least for the short and medium term.

No, it does not. It says that less than half a percent went to well known merchant service providers. The rest did not.

The statement that the rest is speculation is, in itself, pure speculation.

We don't know how to separate speculation from non-speculation. One could easily argue that the payments to merchants is no less speculative than payments to exchanges (what does it matter if you sell your Bitcoin for a carpet or for dollars?).

There's also the fact that most speculation probably never sees the blockchain. They are simply contracts somewhere or entries in Coinbase's database.

Sorry, I didn't ask whether you liked what they were saying; I asked whether I was reading correctly that that was what they were saying.

I have absolutely no idea how you got that from my comment.

Could be. Although I bet it would be just as surprising (and in the same way) to find out how much activity in the "conventional" financial system is due to speculation.