It's value is exactly determined by supply-and-demand. It's just as much a "foreign currency" as let's say Vatican Angelbucks. (We know that only a fixed amount of angelbucks will ever exist. So it's deflatory, and it has no earthly uses. But you can send it to your pals via PrayWire, so you can buy coffee with, and so on.)

And if you look at the price graphs it's not always going up. It's a synthetic currency with no real backing economy (and the transaction costs are insane). Pretty straightforward.

Sorry, let me clarify. Stop acting like it’s a viable currency/infrastructure. I get that you can arbitrarily label anything as these.

Right, because I should wait days for banking wire transfers to get rescued out of the slush pile underneath a fax machine somewhere if I want to pay someone with a different bank.

Literal tens of billions of dollars are using these systems to great success. The numbers are refuting your arguments, and will continue to.

When we are all carrying counterfactual wallets, able to hold any number of cryptocurrency, or NFT ownership tokens (of the deed or lease to your house, social club entry etc), with social recovery from your closest family/friends when you smash your iPhone, then what will your argument against technology be, I wonder?

There was plenty of money working successfully in Enron, Madoff Investment Securities, and Evergrande, too.

The traditional systems that are apparently inscrutable to you move, in SWIFT’s case, $5 trillion (with a T) per day. These generally settle in a few minutes.

P.S. Transparently resorting to straw men like “if you doubt crypto then you just don’t like technology” is the sort of stuff that prevents people from taking this movement seriously.

> The traditional systems that are apparently inscrutable to you move, in SWIFT’s case, $5 trillion (with a T) per day. These generally settle in a few minutes.

Not open to you.

Gold has spiraled indefinitely in value and has been used as currency and/or infrastructure for thousands of years.

https://www.thebalance.com/gold-price-history-3305646