Bitcoin averages something on the order of 200,000 transactions per day. It's useful to someone.
Also, all systems that pay taxes are negative sum as well! Utility is not measured in money.
You're also wrong about taxes. Consider my local taqueria. They buy raw materials and create value by making ready-to-eat food just when people are hungry. They receive cash in exchange, a portion of which they pay in taxes to fund the infrastructure their business depends upon.
That is positive sum for all participants. It has to be. If taxes tipped it into the negative sum category, they'd eventually close down.
If you buy 50 dollars of taco materials, then taco materials seller makes likes than 50 dollars ,because the state will charge a tax on him. If he didnt sell 50 dollars worth of raw materials, he would have 50 dollars of raw materials to consume, instead of less than 50 dollars.
On the other side, making the taco, you have the same issue: if you sell 100 dollars of tacos, and someone pays you 100 dollars for them, you then pay taxes.
You earn less than 100 dollars, and someone else lost 100 dollars. Repeat the proces ad-infinitum and your holdings go to 0. (assuming for simplification, any rate of positive taxation on income).
Most economic activity is positive sum. When I'm hungry and on the go, a taco is more valuable to me than raw taco materials, so I pay more for it. Value has been created. The taqueria owner takes money in, pays their expenses, and is left with a profit. Taxes are paid out of that profit, and you could just as well model it as another kind of expense, a societal infrastructure fee.
Many countries use value creation as an explicit taxation model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax
Those are still positive-sum interactions in the economic sense: https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/blog/qa-what-is-a-positive...
But not dollars, which is what you are using to classify gambling as negative-sum.
> Many countries use value creation as an explicit taxation model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax
If the gobernment collected that tax but didnt spend or issued money, even VAT ends up capturing all the money supply.
This is an unnecessary long argumentation. Gambling is not negative sum because they provider entertainment that has utility.
I understand you are claiming the entertainment value outweighs the harm of exploitation and addiction. I strongly disagree.
If you buy 50 dollars of taco materials, then taco materials seller makes likes than 50 dollars ,because the state will charge a tax on him. If he didnt sell 50 dollars worth of raw materials, he would have 50 dollars of raw materials to consume, instead of less than 50 dollars.
On the other side, making the taco, you have the same issue: if you sell 100 dollars of tacos, and someone pays you 100 dollars for them, you then pay taxes.
You earn less than 100 dollars, and someone else lost 100 dollars. Repeat the proces ad-infinitum and your holdings go to 0.
Expected value is not the only thing to consider. Higher moments matter.
Insurance typically has negative expected value but it’s rational to buy it (in conjunction with owning the insured object) to reduce one’s variance.
Gambling will increase the variance of one’s portfolio at the cost of expected value, which can be rational depending on one’s situation.
Apart from weird edge cases where an actor needs to double their money overnight to return to solvency in order to have a chance of benefiting from an income stream in future, there aren't many cases where it makes sense from a portfolio allocation basis given the existence of non-negative expectation bets in other markets with a wide range of possible variances. The insurance and investment management industries are built on the principle that economic rationality works in exactly the opposite way to gambling: that inherent value exists in reducing risk.
It's a useful currency.
Amazon alone probably handles more transactions over the course of a couple of weeks.
[1] https://www.quora.com/How-many-credit-and-debit-card-transac...
Even prominent Bitcoin advocates agree it's not effective as a currency: http://avc.com/2017/08/store-of-value-vs-payment-system/