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.
You must log in or register to comment.
Steam STOPPED taking cryptocurrencies, because of the normal level of criminality in the people drenched in them… “you do NOT want to be doing business with these people”.
I’d use an Algorand-type blockchain for both accounting-records ( breaking “cooking the books” ) & for currency,
but then you’ve got monero which is engineered specifically to enforce that money-laundering is unbreakable, so that organized-crime can move money without any accountability ( I’m including criminal-government-entities, including insider-trading, in organized-crime ).
Nobody’s making the right infrastructure-decisions, … so whatever.
_ /\ _
That’s not true, Steam stopped accepting Bitcoin because of the large transaction fee and value volatility. Here’s the news from when they did that https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1464096684955433613 in case you don’t believe someone who was buying games with BTC on Steam back then.
The owner of Valve, I don’t remember his name, old round guy with a grey beard, stated exactly what I said, on video.
_ /\ _
Do you have a link to that video? Until you do I’ll believe the official communication from the company that I linked which has examples on the issues they were facing.
I asked gemini to find it…
Apparently it was in 2 simultaneous interview-publications, by different sites…
don’t know why I’ve got memory of it being video, instead of text, but here’s the answer I got:
While Gabe Newell definitely made those blunt remarks, you are actually remembering a text-based print interview rather than a video clip.
In late February 2022, during the media press tour for the launch of the Steam Deck, Gabe Newell did a series of one-on-one interviews where he addressed Valve’s ban on NFTs and why they stopped accepting Bitcoin back in 2017.
The specific quote you are thinking of comes from two parallel interviews published on the same day:
1. The Interview with PC Gamer
When discussing the nightmare of accepting Bitcoin on Steam, Newell focused heavily on the sheer volume of bad actors:
“The problem is that a lot of the actors who are in that space are not people you want interacting with your customers. We had problems when we started accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment option. 50 per cent of those transactions were fraudulent, which is a mind-boggling number. These were customers we didn’t want to have.”
2. The Interview with Rock Paper Shotgun
In a companion interview published simultaneously, he used almost the exact phrasing from your memory when talking about the NFT and blockchain crowd:
“The people in the space, though, tend to be involved in a lot of criminal activity and a lot of sketchy behaviours… With the actors that are currently in this NFT space, they’re just not people you really are wanting to be doing business with.”
Why is there no video?
Because these outlets sat down with Gabe in private press rooms to gather quotes for written feature articles, no official video or audio of these specific exchanges was broadcast.
If you remember seeing or hearing it, you likely watched a video from a gaming news channel (like YongYea, Inside Gaming, or IGN) or a TikTok/YouTube Short where a narrator read Gabe’s text quotes out loud over gameplay footage or B-roll of Newell.
He didn’t hold back, but he did it via the power of the written word!
So, now you’ve got both explicit-quotes, AND 2 independent sources-for-that-interview.
I hope that’s good-enough.
I’m not digging into it any more.
_ /\ _
It lets people buy illegal stuff (like drugs or HRT), which can be good and bad.
It’s possible to buy gift cards for different services with it.The first real-world transaction with bitcoin was a pizza funnily enough.
A pizza for 10,000 bitcoins no less, must be the most expensive pizza in the world lmao
Ah, but would Bitcoin ever be worth more than a dollar if it wasn’t for that purchase?
Buying drugs
I found crypto earlier than some. (not everyone – if I had more I wouldnt have to work anymore, haha!)
IMHO, the main value proposition of crypto is permissionless peer-to-peer payments. If we both have crypto wallets, and you send me an address to make a payment to, I can send that without needing anyone’s approval first. I don’t need any bank to agree to have me as a customer first, or any government to approve why the transaction is taking place. All I need is a functioning payment network, and the original Bitcoin white paper solved how to provide that and preserve anonymity. (Really Pseudo-anonymity, but only the nerds and Monero shills care about the difference)
As an academic experiment regarding permissionless payments, it is a resounding success. But, it turns out, Governments have laws regarding who can pay who, and about scamming people, regardless of the medium. So, just because Bitcoin enables permissionless payments doesn’t mean you can pay whomever you want, or makes scams somehow permissible.
Furthermore, the rapid increase in crypto prices really doomed any chance at all for useful adoption. Because people don’t want to spend crypto anymore. They view it as a Store of Value, and who can blame them, given how it has risen from nothing to a > $2T market cap, even after the recent downturn? You used to be able to use crypto in regular transactions, but not anymore.
So it is digital cash without the backing of a government and no stability.
It was (briefly) useful for buying and selling illicit substances.
It’s great for sending money abroad. No bank, minimal fees. I use it for that all the time, to send friends gifts for weddings and birthdays and stuff.
Yes, this requires everyone in the transaction to be on the network and know how to sell cryptocurrency; the question is whether it’s useful, not whether it’s useful with no caveats 😋
Bitcoin alone uses more electricity than Norway.
And that electricity is mostly from burning coal, so crypto is great for creating global warming
Wait until you hear about the energy cost of traditional finances.
Why are you asking a question when you clearly made up you mind already? :)
You are wrong of course, you can buy anything with crypto as long as the other person accepts crypto (there are dozens of marketplaces, not only darknet ones, e.g. xmrbazaar).
My instance hosting is paid for in Monero. I plan to change it soon to another hosting, which also accepts Monero. The domain is also paid for in Monero. Same for my VPN (Mullvad actually offers 10% off when you pay in crypto!) and mail. I regularly donate to projects such as GrapheneOS, Qubes, Whonix, TOR using Monero. I donate Monero to support people hosting things I use, e.g. invidious instances. Your employer absolutely can pay you in crypto if they choose to, and there are examples of people who do receive their salary in crypto. You could easily find examples/articles about that if you wanted to.
No, money is not defined by “everyone agreeing that it is valuable and willing to exchange it for goods and services”. Do you think Zimbabwean dollar (or any other foreign currency other than a few most popular ones) is valuable? Would you agree to sell me your goods and services for it? Why not? Right, because it is not the currency YOU use. Other people use it, so it is money for them. Same with crypto. People use it as trustless p2p money whether you like it or not.If you need to hate crypto so much please get back to arguments such as “oh no it uses a lot of energy and allows people to
freely exchange it for goods and servicesbuy drugs on the internet”, at least those are correct. Please also subscribe to r/buttcoin if you use reddit.It’s useful for sending money internationally in situations that would be otherwise difficult
You can use Monero to buy things anonymously. Whilst not perfect, it makes it significantly harder to identity or trace you. Other than that, not really, that’s the only real use case for crypto in my opinion, for privacy
+1 for Monero for sure. I wouldn’t even say its just good for buying drugs like some others suggested.
https://monerica.com/ is made for you to find stuff to buy with monero. You can find almost anything there including phsical wares like clothes, food, and also lots of online services lile hosting providers for example. I even saw an accounting firm there.
Wouldn’t cash work the same here?
If you’re able to use cash, then that works too. Unfortunately, you can’t insert cash into your computer though, lol
Short answer: No.
It’s good for losing a bunch of money.
Just one point to add: there is no currency that is universally accepted. You probably cant buy a pizza with Kuwaiti dinar right now either. But that’s definitely a currency. So your part about “everyone agrees” is not really true of any currency. They work only for a subset of humanity who mutually agree it has value. And you can absolutely find people who will buy crypto from you using other currencies, or give you goods and services for it. Those people are rather randomly distributed around the world though instead of being grouped inside one geographic border. That’s the only difference.
Money laundering, it’s really good for that
