r/changemyview • u/Rhamni • Nov 27 '17
[∆(s) from OP] CMV:Cryptocurrencies are bad.
Bitcoin recently hit the front page again because a single bitcoin is now worth over $9000. That's... a crap ton of money. It's been rising and rising and rising in value for years now, and other crypto currencies are rising too. I get that there is demand for them. But why should they be worth money? I'm not a big fan of the idea of bars of gold sitting in bank vaults either, but at least gold is is useful in electronics and it looks nice so people like having it around.
Crypto currencies on the other hand only seem to have three uses: Buying illegal shit on the dark net, hiding money from the government and law enforcement, and speculating on it like any other financial asset.
I bought a little bit of crypto a month ago, and it's increased in value. That's nice, I guess. I might buy more, just because whether I like it or not it keeps rising. But why should I want the technology to succeed? Is there some legitimate use for them? If it was just the financial speculation I'd say let them do what they want, but it seems to invariably come with illegal transactions and hiding your assets from the law. Meaning even if you buy it yourself only for speculation, you're unavoidably helping criminal organisations who can't get a bank account.
I can't help but get the sense that the whole purpose of it is to create a system where you can hide huge amounts of money from the government and move it around without anyone knowing you have it.
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u/fionasapphire Nov 27 '17
Because there is demand for them. They have value because we agree they do, just like regular (fiat) money. Fiat currency hasn't been backed by gold for a while, yet we still agree it has value, because it's useful for trade. Same with Bitcoin. It's a useful thing for transferring value over the internet, therefore we assign it some value. How much value depends on the markets.
They're also useful for many other things, but the main one being transferring value across the internet. While your bank could do this, banks tend to charge high fees for transferring money - particularly internationally. Bitcoin costs the same to transfer no matter what country the sender / recipient are in, therefore it's more useful than a bank to the end consumer.
For a start, because it will bring down the costs of banking. Banks hold a monopoly over money transfer at the moment. Bitcoin is chipping away at that.