The thing about money is that it only has value because we collectively agree that it does. If you have a dollar or a euro or a yuan, it's valuable literally only because other people will give you stuff for it. There's not really anything special about it otherwise, it's just really useful to have some way of trading things in easily-transferable numbers

Crypto is theoretically the same in terms of what makes it valuable, except for that far fewer people agree that it is valuable and there's much less agreement on how valuable it is amongst those who do

[–] JustPlainDave@lemmy.zip 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The money is backed by the government producing it though. Crypto is backed by opinion at best.

[–] daychilde@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

If you want to be as far as possible to crypto (why would you? I'm just being conversational and slightly contrarian for fun - I hate crypto in general), you could argue that money is largely backed by the opinions of people about the governments claiming to back the currency.

Even with that, though, I'll deal in currnecy any day of the week.

Especially since most people buying crypto view it as a get-rich investment, not as currency. So even at best, it's like a super-volatile stupid gold or something. And at least gold has some inherent value.