Do people buy real world things with cryptocurrency now? Is this even a requirement? People aren't buying anything with GameStop stock, but it seems to be doing fine.

Those are definitely different things. Owning a GameStop stock gives you a small ownership and right to their profits (in form of dividends) in real money.

Owning a cryptocurrency means nothing if you can't actually use it as a currency in real world.

Owning a cryptocurrency gives you the right to exchange it for real money later -- and usually way more money! Speculation is fun, and profitable!

Yes, dark web markets are booming. dark.fail is a good starting point if you want to explore them.

GameStop won't keep increasing for ten years, like crypto did, without some real world fundamentals.

Even in GME case, you have the short sellers as a backbone for its rise, not just buying and selling for the sake of it. Without the short sellers, GME wouldn't have risen up that much.

>Yes, dark web markets are booming. dark.fail is a good starting point if you want to explore them.

Any decent one is using Monero, which isn't necessarily the target of a ton of speculation, I think.

The on-ramp to monero is usually through bitcoin.

and the price of Monero is correlated to BTC because of that. it'll be a long time before xmr becomes independent, if ever.

True.

Definitely. Personally I only buy flights&hotels (&Amazon via Purse.io) with crypto.

Mostly homes and mortgages for me, not so much tangible objects as ramming a few hundred k back down JP Morgan’s throat.

Disclosure: my sell orders are always higher than the current market rate

I want to withdraw cryptocurrency to keep the funds safe, not to spend it. Exchanges are single points of failure and we can expect to lose it all if their security is breached.

People seem quite happy to plow money into NFTs, though you can't use them for anything besides selling to a greater fool.