Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are useless
economist.com
economist.com
I'd never used crypto ATMs before as I never felt the need based in the states but for the first time I looked up a BTC ATM (5 mins walk from my hostel), transferred some BTC over from my Coinbase account, withdrew cash within 20 mins.
No Transferwise/WesternUnion, no calling up friends or family and figuring things out. This was the smoothest way I've ever received cash in a foreign country.
I'm not commenting about price speculation of crypto, etc. But if this experience is possible right now, I bet there's going to be a lot more use-cases within 5 years with actual users.
99.99% of people will get a backup bank card before they get into bitcoin.
I'm just predicting at some point, more and more services will start popping up and this argument of "Is Bitcoin useful" will become less relevant.
Ok, who set up that ATM. If not western union, there is supposedly some other company taking some percentage doing this?
I was also worried about the conversion and the rate and fees but in the end when I calculated, it was barely any different from the spot price on Coinbase at that time.
Honestly the ATM could've been a bit more clear on the fees and the rate, etc. But I was quite happy with the service.
Fascinating. Somehow the ATM network was confident that it had your BTC and was willing to give you actual cash within 20 minutes. That suggests that either they don't care much about security or that what you actually did had very little to do with Bitcoin. Did you perhaps actually just convert Coinbase value to Hungarian Forints without really involving any Bitcoin transactions?
I'm not really trying to be snarky. There may be a genuinely useful economy based on companies like Coinbase that operate under different rules than your usual banks, but it's not clear to me that Bitcoin per se or, for that matter, blockchains, are an important part of this.
It is fairly simple to verify this. By this time (20 minutes), it would have had 1-2 confirmations, which is sufficient for small amounts.
I'm pretty sure they waited for two-block confirmations instead of the usual 6 because of the risk analysis. The amount was not much and so I think that might have something to do with it.
That's still an occurrence of Bitcoin being a transferable unit of value, though.
We're not yet on the canonical usage of Bitcoin (that would be you using a private key you're in control of), but we're getting there.
True.
> We don't know if the ATM network and Coinbase transacted on the blockchain.
The action on my part on Coinbase was basically transferring / sending BTC to an external BTC address. So the transaction was definitely on the blockchain. But yes, I see your point.
I was also carrying my Ledger wallet but to plug it into my laptop and then initializing the transfer while standing at the ATM was not possible. So yeah, still getting there.
Oh, so it did involve a Bitcoin address. You're right, I don't think they tried to find each other through metadata to settle it outside the Blockchain. That would be dumb, plus the inconveniencing 20 minutes is consistent with that.
It's great to see examples like this in the wild. I've been hearing lightning is getting greater usability and traction as well. Interesting times.
Normal chain reorganizations of length two are rare (4 observed in a 2 year period [1]), and since miners mostly select transactions for inclusion in a block based only on price, blocks on both side of the fork normally contain the same set of transactions.
It is of course possible for some motivated attacker to force a reorg and double spend some Bitcoin.
Since Nakamoto consensus is probabilistic, it is possible to force a reorg with significantly less than 51% of the total hashpower in the network. For example, an attacker with 20% of the hashpower has a 22% chance of causing a reorg after 2 blocks and an attacker with 51% of the hashrate has a 98% chance of causing a reorg after 2 blocks [2]
The commonly cited 6 block wait time was chosen as after this time the probability of an attacker with 10% of the hash power being able to force a reorg is below 0.001 [2].
Only ~0.05% of the hashpower in the Bitcoin network is available to rent on the open market[3], meaning that it is extremely cost and labor intensive to attain the required computational resources (even 20% of the hashpower would require being able to direct the hashpower of ~733,000 Bitmain's newest miner [4]).
However it is safe to assume that organisations with control of sufficient computational power exist (Bitmain, operators of large mining pools), and it seems quite credible to believe that multiple large mining farms would collude if forcing a reorg would be profitable.
In order to attack the ATM one of these organisations would need to send money to the ATM service, wait two blocks, immediately withdraw the money at an ATM, and then broadcast their malicious fork (with the deposit transaction erased) to the network.
Since this attack would fail at least some of the time, miners would have to forgo some portion of their income (blocks from failed attacks are not included in the main chain and so miners don't get the reward in those blocks). An attacker controlling 20% of the hashrate would give up 78% of their profits for the duration of the attack [2].
The attack would need to gain the miners more than the expected loss in block reward (for 20% hashrate this is ~$430,000 per hour [5]), which seems unlikely for such a logistically intensive attack (would require a v large on the ground operation), and there are anyway much easier targets (transfers to large exchanges are the most common double spend attack vector).
Pool operators could maybe run this attack for a while without being detected, but the same issues with logistics as above apply.
[1]: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/3343/what-is-the...
[2]: https://people.xiph.org/~greg/attack_success.html
[3]: https://www.crypto51.app/
[4]: https://gist.github.com/xwvvvvwx/d99fa4c38ddf3988fff52d8b86f...
If you still have your phone, or access to a computer to log in to internet banking, you can get a couple of codes to withdraw a preset amount from an ATM.
Banks, globally, are going to offer these services well before they let their lunch get eaten.
I believe that in time there will be a stable crypto but for now, we're just in the beta phase looking at problems and finding solutions.
“Economists define a currency as something that can be at once a medium of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account. Lack of adoption and loads of volatility mean that cryptocurrencies satisfy none of those criteria... as things stand there is little reason to think that cryptocurrencies will remain more than an overcomplicated, untrustworthy casino.“
That bitcoin is a poor medium of exchange and unit of account is hard to argue against at this stage of adoption. But store of value? I’m more confident in the maintained value of Bitcoin than that of a Venezuelan Bolívar. That’s not a strong enough reason for me to hold bitcoin, but if I lived in Venezuela it sure as hell would be!
Moving from the realm of currency to usefulness, there’s no faster & cheaper way to transfer money across national borders.
Viewed in this light it’s just a younger, more easily stored, more fungible, more easily transferable gold.
Now I do hold more gold than bitcoin (in USD, combined about 6% of my portfolio atm) because certainly risks remain. But to say it has no utility is just crazy! I guess precious metals are useless too. What’s their market cap again?
That the best use cases for cryptocurrencies found in ten years of trying are illegal doesn't say much for its utility.
If enthusiasts think that paying for stuff with cryptocurrencies is going to become popular, I don't think it's just a "dismissive media tune" to point out that after ten years, it hasn't happened.
If you’re in Venezuela it’s hard to get your hands on $5000 USD and convince other people it’s legitimate.
$5000 USD in eggs will go bad before you can trade them all.
$5000 USD in laundry detergent is several truckloads!
Gold coins might be a good option but A) You’d better keep them well protected and B) Why not keep $2500 in gold coins and $2500 in bitcoin?
It used to be the argument for Bitcoin was this vast thing that could fix US Centralized Banking once and for all. And now, your best argument appears to be fixing an inflationary economy run by a dictator.
While it may give people the ability to use a new currency without government approval, at some point a person has to convert a Bolivar to a Bitcoin and back. And a dictator can make most of those conversions illegal, if he so chooses.
So no. Your argument doesn't sway me. Particularly because Brazil went through something similar a few years ago as well and didn't require the use of bitcoin to fix it's inflationary spiral.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/12/02/458222801/epis...
But most transactions can be done without Bolivars.
> And a dictator can make most of those conversions illegal, if he so chooses.
Dollar conversions in Venezuela (at black market rates) are already illegal, yet they exist.
How did Brazil fix its inflationary spiral, and how does this invalidate Venezuelans using cryptocurrency due to an intransigent government?
> But not all transactions require Bolivars. That is the point.
Only if everyone agrees to not use the Bolivar anymore and say something that everyone has readily access to that can't be counterfeited. At which point you say, "BITCOIN IS THE ANSWER", except it's not because Bitcoin is not easy to obtain. It requires some technical skill, a bank that allows you to make bitcoin transactions, etc.
And even if most transactions no longer require the Bolivar, then using Bitcoin at all is mostly a moot point.
> Dollar conversions in Venezuela (at black market rates) are already illegal, yet they exist. I don’t see your point.
Right, and so if you want to not be thrown in prison you're going to use the Bolivar and not US Currency. The same would be true with Bitcoin if Bitcoin were made illegal.
Can you explain how editing "not all transactions require Bolivars" to "most transactions can be done without Bolivars" is goalpost moving?
> Only if everyone agrees to not use the Bolivar anymore
Not true. People can use the Bolivar for some transactions and not others.
> It requires... a bank that allows you to make bitcoin transactions
What do you mean?
> Right, and so if you want to not be thrown in prison you're going to use the Bolivar and not US Currency.
Not true. Many Venezuelans don't want to be thrown in prison and use US currency, because it's a matter of survival.
> The same would be true with Bitcoin if Bitcoin were made illegal.
What would be true if Bitcoin were made illegal? And where?
Sounds like you’ve got a bone to pick with some ideology I’m not privy to.
And to your point - bitcoin doesn’t need to solve a crisis to be useful! It just needs to be useful to be useful.
Typically the people who shill bitcoin the hardest are the ones with an active stake in it. If this were the stock market, it would be a pump and dump.
Anyway even counterfeit dollars would probably hold their value better than the Bolivar. It's hard enough to print counterfeit money (unless you have the resources of a state) that the supply is probably significantly more constrained than the Bolivar even if a significant portion of the dollars in Venuzuela were counterfeit. Until there's someone pumping out convincing fake dollars as fast as Bolivars are printed you still might be better off holding onto possibly-fake dollars. Even if 70% of your $5k is fake, the remainder won't inflate away like Bolivars will.
I'll grant that Bitcoin are probably better than fake dollars though.
The problem is that the Bolivar is so toxic it's almost radioactive. An exchange wouldn't want to deal with Bolivar's at all, since the price could drop 5% in a day, say.
Even if you could exchange Bolivar cash for black market bitcoins, the black market would have Bolivars to get rid of. And that would manifest itself back into the price of the transaction.
From a recent article (VEF = Venezuelan Bolívar):
>According to Coin Dance, 14,886 Bitcoin have been purchased with VEF on LocalBitcoins between the beginning of 2018 and Aug. 18.
(there's more on the VEF BTC rate here https://dolartoday.com/indicadores/)
My point is that it has an INTRINSIC value, not just an arbitrary value we've assigned to it, but a natural value that comes only to things that are actually naturally valuable... that statement may seem to be self referential, i.e. wet because not dry, but I think it makes the point I'm trying to get across, which is: there's a difference between that which IS valuable, and that which has value because WE assign it value.
Like tulips in pre-crash 1637, "bitcon" only has the value we assign to it, in reality it's nothing but numbers and we've plenty of those.
That it can and probably will decrease in value drastically when a majority of people realize it has no INTRINSIC value... well that should be warning enough to those wise enough to think about critically.
It's not like "market cap" really even applies to it here, yes each "coin" is assigned some value and the multiplication applied methodically does seem to come up with a giant number, but there are no REAL assets... it's not like it's a share of stock in a company that makes anything, it's all ethereal, there's absolutely nothing of value except the fact that somebody else is willing to exchange something of REAL value for it... when that's gone, the whole thing will be another story on Wikipedia...
10% of the price of gold IS valuable, the other 90% is WE valuable. What does that say to you?
If you agree that bitcoin has at least 0.0001% IS valuable (for example for some collectors of digital artefacts), then where do you draw the line, what percentage of IS valuable do you require so that you would consider bitcoin having some INTRINSIC value as gold does?
Bitcoin, and most other virtual currencies, are only "hard" to counterfeit because limitations in current technologies ( math included ) make it so... What happens when that goes away?
What would the value of bitcoin be tomorrow if some scientist today, publishes a paper providing an easier way to factor large numbers? What about Moore's law? What about quantum computing and machine learning? What about breakthroughs in mathematics or cryptography? Start thinking about all the intellectual manpower working every day on any number of things that could make the very basis for bitcoin obsolete, and you start thinking that maybe the value we assign it is a bad bet.
As far as gold goes, until someone creates a philosopher's stone, or starts 3d printing gold atoms, I think we're safe to assume you would still have to mine the stuff and refine it, and that amount of work isn't going away anytime soon... and therefore the "value" of it isn't going to zero soon either.
I'm pretty sure most cryptography experts would consider nuclear war more likely than a breakthrough in crypto which breaks bitcoin (and the rest of the world). Yes, it's possible, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it.
Gold supply is elastic, unlike bitcoin which is hard coded.
Gold mining is dictated by the gold price. When gold price goes up, miners start to dig again in regions that were too expensive before. When price goes down, they stop. With a suitable (huge) gold price, it makes sense to just filter it out from ocean water. And let's not even think about giant gold asteroids which are out there.
Not the best list, but still: https://www.toptenz.net/10-post-apocalyptic-currencies-more-...
Or do you keep it in a vault in your house along with two years’ rations in case the world’s electricity stops working?
I don’t mean to be rude, but let’s try to keep the arguments rational. I’m happy to be convinced otherwise about bitcoin’s value. But I need to be convinced.
Gold has an intrinsic value of “beauty” and has a minor use in electronics. Bitcoin lets you make international money transfers easily.
People rarely buy sandwiches with gold. People rarely buy sandwiches with bitcoin (though I hope that changes in the future, because it will increase the value of bitcoin!).
It’s true that you can hold a piece of gold in your hand. But, honestly, how often do you do that? And more to the point - do you think most of the people who own gold do it for its physical properties, or so they can eventually exchange it for fiat currency?
I compare bitcoin to gold because, to me, they serve the same purpose for the same reasons.
Most people when they say they 'hold gold in their portfolio' don't mean they have the metal lying in their safe. They usually hold shares in a tracking stock like [1], or are active in the commodities market speculating with futures and options on gold, or invested in gold mining companies.
Their is ofc also a real industrial demand for gold. Jewelry makers, electronics firms etc. will take delivery of and use the real metal to make products. For everyone else, it is just numbers in a computer that are transferred from account to account. even when Central banks buy and trade with each-other, the gold never leaves the vault (although it might sometimes be moved from stack to stack inside)
Lately trust in some of these vaults and the accessibility to the actual gold held there has declined, resulting in countries 'repatriating' their gold[2]. As you can imagine, this is not a trivial logistics operation. While the ownership may change, the actual gold never leaves the huge vaults of e.g. the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/markets/etfs/gld/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_repatriation
But you can extrapolate from present-day Venezuela to future runaway-inflation crises, at which time (again, making an assumption here) bitcoin and the internet will be more accessible/prevalent.
Someone in country will likely be happy to exchange the Bitcoin for Bolivars at some discounted exchange rate, but that doesn't solve the problem of how they get Bitcoin.
You can have a few people working remotely for Bitcoin and the like, but that isn't going to support other people moving lots of money out of Bolivars.
So in essence, there's a legal requirement to use dollars when dealing with the federal government. So while the dollar is technically currency by fiat, it's also currency by legislation.
The current "safelow" gas price on Ethereum is 2.6 gWei, or $0.016.
Stripe/Paypal both charge more than $0.30, or 15-30 times more.
Handily enough, we know exactly how much electricity Visa used in 2017, and it's about 0.19TWh[0]. Now obviously Visa alone isn't the end of the financial system, bank branches, payment processors, and other actors are involved. Personally, I highly doubt that they add up to another 55-72TWh, but if you can prove that, be my guest.
Of course, at this point we're also missing a very important factor: transaction volume. Comparing financial systems in terms of total energy usage is very misleading, a far better way is to measure energy per transaction. And this is the point where it really falls apart for Bitcoin. As of today, bitcoin is averaging about 180,000 transactions a day. That's about 100 seconds of Visa's average volume[1].
Comparing fees is a terrible way to measure transaction cost in terms of kWh. First of all, Stripe and Paypal employ a lot of people, and people are quite expensive. Second, bitcoin miners are being compensated by the expected rewards of finding a block (or participating in a pool that finds one). This means that the transaction fee and the amount of electricity used simply may not be related at all, since the fee might drop below the electricity cost so long as the expected reward is bigger still.
0. https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil... 1. 150,000,000 transactions per day[2] / 86400 2. https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business-tools/.... Theoretical (and heavily advertised) capacity is 24k, but a more prosaic 1.8k/s is more in line with a typical daily load.
Hell, my bank even has direct integration with Transferwise so I can send money back home to Australia instantly for next to free right within my iPhone app
I know decentralization is not a huge selling point for most people who just want to do things instantly from within their phones, I myself have little usage for it, but there has been a time where Transferwise halted BRL transfer due to currency being unstable, if I relied solely on TW for my transfers this could be a huge problem for me, one that(in theory) happens because it's a decision of a centralized entity.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/banking/best-ways-to-wire-mo...
There are tons of banking solutions in every country for transferring money. But they typically have low limits and require appropriate documentation.
I usually use PayPal or Visa / MasterCard.
And in general, they are doing something that’s very difficult.
You wrote:
> If you have a business that delivers some digital product, it is very difficult to serve an international client base without running afoul of anti money laundering compliance issues at banks and such.
And yet I use a whole bunch of services not based in my country of residence that deliver a digital product to my home. Mostly paid through either PayPal or Via / Mastercard.
How can something be very difficult yet extremely common?
Unless you mean receiving payments of large sums of money, in which case you're going to want to engage a transaction processor and legal team anyway. And for even larger sums of money, on an ongoing basis, it's not uncommon for an organisation to setup a local headquarters.
And anyway, the point of anti-money laundering legislation isn't to run afoul of such legislation, it's to decrease the likelihood a business is used by people who have a need to launder money, and to more easily identify and track laundered money, etc.
Or did you mean to imply that setting up a business like PayPal, Stripe, Visa, or Mastercard isn't easy. That's probably most certainly true. You've got to be really dedicated.
Is there something I've missed?
Most companies will just incorporate in the US and use a US payment processor and operate as a US company. If, for example, you have a business in Brazil and you want to sell digital goods it’s not so easy to accept payments at all, let alone international payments. And incorporating in the US can be a hurdle if you don’t live here or have somone who can help you navigate getting set up with things like a US bank account.
PayPal claims¹ to be available in more than 200 countries/regions and support 25 currencies. Does PayPal in Brazil not accept payments from PayPal users in The USA?
I'm not saying some people aren't underserved by money services, though.
I think blockchain has a lot of potential, but I haven't seen many companies really grasp how to use it correctly.
I wish he talked more about properties for the currency use case -which is its most useful usage-.
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On another note, a vast majority of the targeted use cases would benefit from well engineered solutions; having redundant persistence, availability, immutability, ordering, tamper-resistance, non-repudiation. But all this is could be simply achieved with Kafka + PKI signing.
Anyway, hyperledger fabric uses Kafka internally for the ordering... which leads me to say:
If lighting candles in the dark and saying 'blockchain' 3 times is all it takes to make a VC appear and help you build good Kafka + PKI infrastructures to tackle real problems; then I'm all for maintaining this white lie based on all the wrong reasons (which would attention seeking? unspoken implicit promises of riches?).
-Just my 2 Quantum Blockchain 2.0 AI Scalable cents.
And btw they're currently having a BAT giveaway on the Desktop version.
I currently have my 15 giveaway BATs in it (3.37 USD), and it is supposed to give them to site I use?
I'd give some of them to open some paywalls, but not to the economist if they continue to write such vacuus articles.
Maybe give them to open the paywall, then be able to relinquish that payment after having consumed it and it was of low quality.
1.They're not anonymous(IP addresses are exposed). Less private than a bank(where each transaction is not viewed by every other bank user).
2.They're not providing fungibility(unlike gold), each transaction can be traced to source(via blockchain viewer).
3.They're requiring absurd amounts of electricity to generate(esp. Bitcoin which consumes enough electricity to power several countries)
4.They're not fast enough for real-time transaction and real-time finance/trade. Long confirmation times ruin potential to customer-centric interaction.
5.Volatility of value: coins depend on the market trend dictated by big spenders/owners who control vast majority of coins in a cryptocurrency.
6.Concentration of wealth: early adopters and cryptofarming facilities owners hold most of wealth(see point 5).
7.Lack of security: despite being protected by blockchain, most cryptowallets are at risk of being hacked due websites hosting them being far less secure than banks. Lots of cryptocurrency theft doesn't inspire confidence in it.
8.Limited goods market: cryptocurrency is still not adopted enough to be a worthwhile investment, majority of commercial use is for unregulated casinos, illegal goods/services, and donations.
I agree with this sentiment. Since blockchain was introduced I have seen many people building solutions on top of it, but not many people actually using those solutions. Instead, it seems that the most prevalent use of blockchain technology or crypto currency is to boost the speculative wealth of their stakeholders.
In contrast, we’re a decade into blockchain hype, adoption is far easier than getting online was, and yet the only reason most people know about it is ransomware, drug purchases, or speculation. The number of people who have any need to use it on a daily basis is still a tiny fraction of the population and only the speculators would be inconvenienced if it suddenly stopped working tomorrow.
I'm still highly skeptical of the applications of blockchain technologies, it seems to me that the costs and incentive structures are all kinds of wacky, but anyone who thinks that BTC is going to become a mass-adopted currency is just deluding themselves at this point.
I'm a developer on a cryptocurrency called Nano whose goal is to be usable as day-to-day money. I think we are successful to a large degree.
Where, and how, can I use Nano?
If your question is rather on the current number of places which do accept this currency, probably the best place to look is online and Venezuela, which has been left without a local currency in effect.
It seems premature to declare your currency successful when no one can actually use it.
One is the software and technical side. The problem was a creating a scarce digital commodity which can be securely transferred without a cooperating central authority. I judge us successful here.
The other is the the ability to change the world. The software and ideas may be successful, but if adoption is infeasable then we cannot succeed overall. The project is relatively new, but the community support leads me to believe that we are successful to a large degree here as well, relative to the ability of any newcomer to enter the market.
Why would you want day-to-day money to be scarce?
Is not one of the benefits of cash the knowledge that you can go to an ATM and withdraw way more than your day-to-day needs.
An interesting debate that I found recently on which is the better money, cryptocurrencies or gold-backed notes goes into this: https://youtu.be/q8R71WGO3qU
> which is the better money, cryptocurrencies or gold-backed notes goes into this
This is a false dichotomy.
Nevertheless, it is the subject of the debate and the debate also goes into why you would want scarcity as the basis of a money.
Oh and I found the page hard to read with ads and popups, so:
Like what?
Economist in general.
;)
Cryptocurrencies are definitely not useless. Most of them just suffer from pretty shitty negatives, like ridiculous distribution of ownership, ridiculous manipulation, shitty security, infeasible settings, ... This includes pretty much all current cryptocurrencies.
All it would take for a cryptocurrency (yes, a single per market pretty much, crypto-(euro|dollar|...) to take hold is for the central market to push it and be controllable by them (almost fully). The issue against that is that international laws and treaties prevent it.
The reality is the stability provided by a centralized monetary system is what most people want above all else. The only way cryptocurrency ever really becomes a transactsble currency is if it provides the same (or greater) stability.
The cryptocurrency that will likely succeed is the one tied to a fiat currency and managed by a central authority. To not see that is to be pretty blind to the social reality of money.
The tech is maturing quite rapidly. Meanwhile, the chain itself is highly available, highly resilient, and keeps on chugging along at 100% availability.
Retail will come back to BTC, and then some. ETH will continue to advance the idea of a world computer (as will other chains) and what that implies. What we saw last year was a single season of a decades-long shift to crypto currency.
Central authorities, by the time they make a move into this space, may be obsolete.
Second, all cryptocurrencys are fiat money.
Have yet to see a crypto-currency that been made legal tender by a government decree. (though, admittedly, it's possible that there's one backed by a nation-state I haven't heard about)
I believe what you mean is that modern currencies (and bitcoin) aren't backed by anything other than pure belief they hold value as opposed to their traditional backing by specie or bullion.
The core idea is that it has value by assertion or fiat, rather than due to some intrinsic property.
The core idea is that "some authority" doesn't assign the value to the money but requires it to be accepted under penalty of the law.
Usually, historically speaking, when a currency is separated from its underlying commodity by fiat it retains its value due to the fact that people have associated it with the value of the commodity -- up until the point "some authority" fires up the printing presses and the historic link is broken.
Anyhoo, not that I'm disagreeing with you on principal it's just that "fiat currency" has a specific meaning that "some authority" has spent a lot of energy trying to disassociate it from.
All currencies will be digital one day, paper money is certainly going to be phased out, as gold coinage was, but it won't be replaced by blockchains, but by systems which recognize trust is central to financial transactions.
The term "trustless" doesn't imply that you don't trust the system. It's the idea that a "trusted" network can emerge from a system with a mix of trustworthy and non-trustworthy nodes.
I can hold my Australian dollar as cash money, but I don’t need to.