Can I buy a pizza with it or pay my bills with it? Can my employer pay me in it? Or is it just an “emperor’s new clothes” thing? I just don’t see the tangible value in it. Rhetorical questions, BTW, I know you can’t buy a pizza with it, at least outside of some edge cases that I’m not aware of.
I thought what made money money was everyone agreed it was valuable and was willing to exchange it for goods and services directly. I don’t see that with crypto.
My understanding is this. Let’s say Valve accepted crypto payments. If they did, they wouldn’t need to go through middlemen payment processors like Visa and Mastercard that can use their influence to dictate what games can and can’t be published on Steam.
But yeah the way it works in practice seems to make crypto a commodity, not a currency.
There is a fee for crypto transaction processing. The fee is the same irrespective of dollar value, so for small transactions, like buying a game, it is more than a cc middleman fee.
Eventually, I think k this is where crypto can work. Something like the digital euro where the transactions are processed by a trusted entity, the European central bank, rather than your local bank through the visa or MasterCard system. If those fees can be low or eliminated, visa and MasterCard are dead.
Fun fact: steam accepted bitcoin until a couple years ago
Yupp and then recently had to deal with Visa and MasterCard swinging their dick around and forcing them into submission with what they could and could not have that was legal in their own store.