It starts with digital services and it spiders out from there. Enthusiasts who own retail stores accept crypto as a novelty or marketing strategy, but in 25 years it could be much more common.
Silk Road was 11 years ago.
When?
If you have some other list of goods and services that people can repeatedly and reliably purchase using crypto, you can provide that to show that crypto is money. The earlier list is almost entirely crypto exchanges and vpns, which is hardly a useful list of goods and services for normal day to day products that people use.
If you can't purchase goods and services with crypto, crypto is not money.
Or do you mean "money is what you can use to pay your taxes"? That works to exclude crypto, at least for most of the world.
Doubly wrong since Amazon also accepts gift cards which can be bought with cash.
> Cash on Delivery is available as a payment method for fulfilled by Amazon and some seller fulfilled items. If you have Gift Card balance in your account, you can redeem it and pay the remaining amount using Cash on Delivery payment method.
[1] https://www.amazon.eg/-/en/gp/help/customer/display.html?nod...
[2] https://smile.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=19428273011&sa-no-re...
[3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/09/18/can-you-shop...
Obviously Amazon supports system that let you convert cash into digital, but that's something else.
Cash is one form of USD, which is money.
In case you're wondering, a cash-only business accepts money too.
Careful with that sentence. It is applicable to paintings, stamps, and collecting in general. True that on those other cases you have a physical object, so it has a value (as opposed to nft) but usually it's far less. A Pokemon card costs almost nothing, but some people are willing to pay millions for it, so it "costs" millions.
Disclaimer: I still agree with your comment, I just think that the reason is more complex than that sentence.
Stamps and other collections are fun to collect and to have, regardless of their monetary value. (After all, people collect otherwise-worthless things like bottle caps, too.)
Cryptocurrencies have no substance to them, they are not interesting to look at, and while I suppose one could get a thrill out of simply knowing one has them, I very much doubt that there's more than a tiny handful of people for whom that would remain true if they were worth $0.
By now they’re a part of our history. I keep a professionally made, empty paper wallet as a souvenir from the 2010s. It’s a lot more tangible than some scrap of paper with 24 random words on it.
Well, it happened with baseball cards and comics, and then everything else. But let's go back to baseball cards. Why did some of them become so valuable? Just a guess but maybe its because they became rare, yet retained nostalgia value. Kids who bought them in the 20s and 30s treated them like the worthless scraps of cardboard that they were. Most were lost or destroyed. But decades later if they came across some they evoked a powerful emotion, maybe the sort of emotion I feel when see the login prompt on a Vic-20 maybe. So they started collecting them, and of course they had the most demand for the legendary players who they idolized as kids, so the value of those went up. After that, its mostly just people speculating. But there was a kernel of real value there to begin.
And it is somehow 'money' only when it suits projects and places like HN. [0] I'm sure any of you would immediately rush to sell 299 Ethereum right now, even if it ran through a Tornado.cash mixer, otherwise you would leave it alone if you believe that it isn't money or worth anything.
> If something only has value because you think you can sell it to the next sucker for more, it is a ponzi scheme.
That is not what a ponzi scheme is.
The very first comment on that use case is, "Please allow me to offer you a free rsync.net account, in perpetuity, for the backup portion of your requirements." [1] Saying that the use case for Monero is to compete with zero-cost services doesn't offer a compelling use-case for Monero.
That's not what a ponzi scheme is.
In a ponzi scheme, there is a fictitious business model that's purported to be turning a profit, and its lack of profit is hidden by secretly using new inflows to pay off old investors.
In crypto, none of that is hidden. It's widely known that dollars cashed out by earlier investors come from the coffers of later investors. Since e.g. Bitcoin doesn't deceive people about being a profitable company, it's by definition not a ponzi scheme.
Edit: This is a discussion section. If you disagree with my comment, let's respectfully discuss it. I see a lot of voting and no replying.
And people do. There's a bitcoin ATM at my local liquor store. And a strip club downtown that takes bitcoin.
You can speculate on the value of any currency. I’ve earned thousands extra this year by invoicing foreign currencies at the right time, at no loss of my customers.
Bitcoin only has value for me because of the things I can buy with Bitcoin. (Privacy preserving technology, online services, drugs, helping friends of friends get out of Ukraine.)