There are many other things that are overvalued, such as real estate - because there's an expectation that they can be used to trade for something else later. In other words, they're bought solely because they're expected to hold their buying power, i.e. they're used as money. The reason why this happens is because modern fiat money doesn't have this property - it's expected to not hold its buying power.
Now, there is money that holds its buying power - bitcoin. It's expected that in the coming years most of the value from real estate and other overvalued assets will transfer into bitcoin, because there's no reason any more to own them other than for their utility.
I'm not sure RE is overvalued. There's a shortage of houses at a time when Millennials (the largest generational cohort so far) are hitting peak household formation.
> Now, there is money that holds its buying power
Bitcoin peaked at around $64K in April 2020. Now it's currently at $38K - it was down to about $30K a month ago. Seems pretty volatile for something that "holds it's buying power".
I know the claim recently was that there were more unoccupied homes than homeless people. Even if you factor out the undesirable/impractical ones, I'd expect if we had some means to unlock that capacity, it would glut and crash the market down to (much closer to) affordability.
It feels like this is one of many problems that are trivial to solve in the abstract, but intractable as long as we worship private-property rights. A simple fix would be an >100% annual value tax on unoccupied dwellings. The vacant-50-weeks-a-year vacation house, or the 'investment property' you're holding to sell in a few years, becomes an instant financial grenade, where it's better to hand the deed over to your pizza delivery guy as a tip than to be not living in it when the tax bill comes due.
Transferring payments across the world is functional, and yes, the traditional financial system also does this, but it doesn't mean crypto has no functionality.
Edit: Previous statement I was responding to has changed. I still don't agree that crypto has no utility though. I agree with almost everything I was responding to except that part. Yes, real estate has more utility, for sure. To me it doesn't matter that crypto has some overlap with traditional finance. This is an iteration on technology, which has its own pros/cons, but some folks are trying to come up with something better. Time will tell if that succeeds or not. IMO, it's too early to tell. You can also see that I wasn't the only person who responded to the parent comment that Bitcoin may be a competitor to capital flowing to gold as a potential inflation hedge.
My main point is let's wait and see how this new technology evolves instead of just shooting it down. I don't think everything about traditional finance is perfect. Negative interest rates in some parts of the world are one sign of that.
I think we can iterate on traditional finance as well as explore other potential solutions. The aversion to cryptocurrency as a technology, when Bitcoin has only been around for a bit over a decade, seems premature to me.
There have been comparisons of cryptocurrency to the internet, which everyone may not agree with, but what if we just shut down the internet before it really took off? Well, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
I still think there's something a little bit special about bitcoin. It simultaneously has the properties of modern electronic currency BUT has some elements of "permission-less-ness" like cash or gold.