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Comment by cyanydeez | Hacker News Reader

Why do people still treat these numbers as equal to fiat, government backed currencies.

You ever been to one of those food plaza places where you have to top up a prepaid card in order to pay for the restaurants? Or bought chips at a casino? Or bought Chuckie Cheese tokens as a child to exchange back into "real" money when you're done playing? Stablecoins are like that for the DeFi world. Places like Gemini/Coinbase are the legal onramp. You exchange official money for crypto there, trade it for chuckie cheese tokens, move it out to some other "web 3.0" property operated from god-knows where, then do DeFi stuff there and when you're done you do the above in reverse.

As a child I absolutely loved chuckie cheese tokens! The entire crypto bubble makes so much sense now!

Legal should be in air quotes.

At best, these coins are the prize tickets from a game played with legal tender and those prizes are certainly valuable but because tickets can be exchanged for prizes you convince a bunch of ignorant people to just give you money for tickets.

Your version ignores the nfts and other garbage "built" on the block chain

You can't change Chuck-E-Cheese tokens back into real money. The entire point is that they get all of your real money at the time when you buy the tokens, making it irrelevant whether you use them afterward at all.

> You can't change Chuck-E-Cheese tokens back into real money.

Same thing with Tether. Retail "investors" can't change Tether back into USD unless they do so on amounts > $100,000.

It's the same scheme.

> The entire point is that they get all of your real money at the time when you buy the tokens, making it irrelevant whether you use them afterward at all.

Yup, Tether in a nutshell.

Even if you could convert Chuck-E-Cheese tokens back to real cash, who would thing that's a great place to hold your life savings as opposed to a bank?

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