It’s an excellent waste of electricity and computational resources

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

It’s useful for sending money internationally in situations that would be otherwise difficult

Money laundering, it’s really good for that

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.

Crime, mostly.

I’ve bought some online services with it.

Is a question still rhetorical if you’re wrong? Because you absolutely can buy a pizza and pay bills with it, you’ve been able to for years. You can also get paid in it, you’ve been able to for years.

Just because you choose not to, doesn’t mean you can’t.

It’s a technology that allows you to verifiably possess a definite quantity of “a thing.” That thing is just virtual.

Think of it this way: shares in companies are also virtual things. You can’t build a bridge out of em.

But a stock exchange is there to sell them to you and they will keep track that yes, you do actually own X shares of company Y.

Instead of issuing shares on a stock exchange to raise money, a new company could just sell shares of itself by creating a new crypto. There would be a finite number of “coins” representing ownership shares. The company could control whether more can be created. And it would be verifiable who owns what.

So that verifying and quantity-control are both features of the software itself. You could say it’s good for those things. As I illustrated above, this could be used to virtualize ownership of something, including the buying and selling of shares of it.

Anecdotally, I’ve heard that trans people use it to buy hormones because HRT is usually not covered by national healthcare or insurance, so the people selling them aren’t doing so fully entirely technically legally.

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.

Short answer: No.

Very low fee cross-border (remittance) transfers using stablecoins (cryptoassets that are pegged to a fiat currency like the dollar) allow people to avoid getting ripped off by companies like Western Union.

On crypto platforms like Ethereum that support smart contracts (basically computer programs that run on the blockchain and allow you to automate transfers etc), you can provide liquidity to money markets and asset exchange platforms and earn many times the interest yield (APY) of what you might get at a bank for a similar thing (like 12-60% vs 2-5%). If you’re a real finance nerd you can also access various exotic financial instruments on other platforms that otherwise wouldn’t be available to you unless you were at a huge investment bank or hedge fund and even some that aren’t possible there. These are often called DeFi platforms (Decentralized Finance)

Another huge use of crypto networks are money laundering and scams though so beware. It’s still a largely unregulated black market. Never put more money into a crypto network than you can afford to lose.

In the distant past I used to pay for my phone bill with Bitcoin that I earned through various side jobs. That ended up being convenient because my VOIP company was based in a different country as were the side jobs. But later the transaction costs for Bitcoin rose and it didn’t make sense.

You wrote that money is money because everyone agrees it’s valuable. But if I go to a pizza place in New York City and try to pay in Thai baht, they probably won’t take it. Therefore, it’s not money… But of course it’s money. It’s just not the right kind of money for that place.

The way I look at it is that cryptocurrency is basically a security with no real use, but it can store ‘value’ in the same way those NFT things stored value for a while. There are more bullshitters for crypto, so they’ll keep that hype train going longer, and you can semi work it to get some profit by buying the security low, and selling it high.

There was a post a while ago about how around something like 2020 or whatever, with billions invested in it, and with huge amounts of power/electricity going towards it, bitcoin had something like less than 10 transactions per minute globally. Like it’s absolute dogshit when ti comes to transactions, in part because it’s not a currency despite its name.

Currencies need to depreciate in value via inflation – crypto tends to just store value and go up / down solely on its isolated demand as a nebulous concept. In fact, one of the bragging points from cryptobros is often this misguided notion that crypto is a hedge against inflation – as that ‘benefit’ basically disqualifies it as a proper currency. If you get $1000, and that $1000 is able to buy you some quantity of goods, you need that money to be able to buy less of those goods in the future in order to encourage people to actually use the fucking thing. If you had $1000, but were almost assured that it would be able to buy twice as many goods in the future if you just held on to it for a bit under your mattress, you wouldn’t spend the money… ever. Sorta like those crazy early crypto experiments where uni students were given like 25 bitcoin to see how they’d spend it – and a bunch did exactly what you said in your opening bit, bought pizzas (you could at the time). Bet they would’ve preferred to buy a bunch of houses and sports cars later on, if they’d realised how popular the fad would get. Bitcoin only tends to go ‘down’ in value when people completely exit the currency, so it’s not a valid currency.

I think you’re generally right in your note about it needing to be exchanged. The whole point of currencies is that you don’t want them to sit idle under someone’s bed. Banks/Credit Unions provide savings accounts that pay interest, though typically slightly less than inflation. This is basically a function where because of inflation, you don’t want to have your money just sit under your bed, you want to invest it in at least a savings account/term deposit – but what’s actually happening there, is that you’re committing your money to the financial institution for a fixed period, and they’re subsequently loaning that out to someone so that person can buy a house (typically) – and then their payments on that house, is what generates your interest earnings (and the banks profits). The house itself is a security, with a general stable/safe valuation, so if that person can’t make their payments on the house, the bank can foreclose, sell it, and still pay you your interest. So your savings are generally very safe – especially, frankly, with simple/smaller financial institutions that aren’t trying to do fancy bullshit / aren’t doing any higher risk wealth management type back end tricks. Main point being though, that because of inflation, even people who have ‘too much’ capital, put it into the market, and it generates economic activity as a result.

Crypto, being a security, doesn’t behave too well in this situation either – in that you can’t realistically hold a security and pay interest on it based on being able to use that security to fund other economic activity. Sorta like if someone hands you 10 shares of a stock (which has a variable price), and you’ve gotta figure out a way to pay that person back 12 shares of stock in a year, buy giving those 10 shares to someone else. What if they don’t want shares of that stock? What if the stock price goes down, or up, significantly? There’s just an absurd amount of risk, that would be considered wildly untenable for something like a person’s core savings vehicle. There are some “interest paying” crypto type accounts these days, but that’s a whole shitload of financial shenanigans and cryptobro bullshit. Cryptocurrencies are basically an economic blackhole.

And speaking of governments, anyone saying that crypto is useful because you can send money globally, is a moron. Banks/Financial institutions have the ability to do global money transfers with ease. The reason they can’t/don’t, is because of LEGAL reasons and regulatory restrictions from governments - it’s not some technical restriction that crypto magically solves. Laws like “You can’t let people fund terrorist groups”. Crypto being able to do those sorts of things quickly is just a matter of them not obeying any of the laws or regulations from governments. That’s not a ‘good’ thing in general. Many of the recent pushes from crypto sorts to get places like the States to recognize them, are basically resulting in banks getting less restrictions – which really isn’t a win. Crypto shows up and is like “We like sending money to north korea, so you gotta remove or neuter that whole know your customer thing for fintechs. Here Mr USA administration, we can pay you by buying millions of dollars of your personal ‘crypto currency’ to help with signing the bill. See, isn’t it so much better to have no regulations/oversight on transactions?! It’s win win!”

And the last negative I’ll note, from my pov at least, is that the core mechanics of most crypto currencies is obfuscated and controlled by cryptobros. Financial industry people make money, but they don’t make the sort of explosive, concentrated wealth that you see occur in crypto for the people who maintain those systems. That’s partly because the financial industry is larger, and involves government components – while crypto currencies are often just some techbro goin “let’s fork bitcoin and stick a dog face on it and sell it to morons for big $$$$ then we can FTX it up fuckin in the bahamas with uggos!”. It’s the sort of obvious conflict of interest that they all try and bullshit their way out of – one that typically doesn’t exist in fiat setups, due to the multiple layers, and the role most govs fill in regulating things.