Hacker News Reader

Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

I can pay my real estate tax with cash. I can go to the store and buy food with cash.

What can I do with crypto? Maybe exchange it for cash if I’m lucky and willing to pay a high fee?

By that logic, gold and silver are also useless.

Edit: I was not saying gold and silver have no use, I was saying the argument that usefulness is dictated by whether you can use something to pay a mortgage is spurious.

Also, to all the people who say "what about X use of gold, crypto can't do that". Obviously that's true. However the vast majority of value in gold has little to do with its applications, it has to do with its scarcity. 9% of gold demand is driven by technology. [https://www.gold.org/about-gold/gold-demand]

You can make really good conductive devices out of gold, and silver is used for high end solder and other things. Both metals have immense industrial value.

Crypto is not precious metals, crypto is art bought at a hot auction. Have you framed your hash codes and put them on the wall yet, or do you just keep them in the basement?

Besides being used in jewellery, gold and silver have other practical applications, particularly gold.

It's used in electronics, aerospace and medicine among other fields. Industries are interested in buying gold for it's practical applications.

But by that definition cash is useless.

I'm not a cryptocurrency fan, but I don't think this is a good argument against it, anything people ascribe value to (however dumb one thinks it is) has.. value.

If I can swap a bitcoin for $20k then a bitcoin is just as useful as $20k.

Rice and beans have a hell of a lot more utility then silver and gold. The later definitely don't derive their value from utility.

Sure, but the price of gold doesn't really follow industry trends -- it's got more to do with the fact that it's a historical store of value / object of desire for the masses.

Not if you are typing from any kind of device that uses gold in its components, or if you consider any of the uncountable ways in which you can exploit precious metals in the real world

Depending on the county, you can walk into a bank and get cash for your gold coins. In other words, governments are behind it. Good luck doing that with crypto.

You can make fake teeth and cutlery out of gold and silver

My electric devices that are full of gold disagree ;)

I can buy an array of chemical substances on the internet with cryptocurrency

> I can pay my real estate tax with cash. I can go to the store and buy food with cash.

People in El Salvador can do the same with bitcoin, no?

> I can pay my real estate tax with cash. I can go to the store and buy food with cash.

There is no real estate tax in El Salvador :)

But paying in bitcoin, even in government institutions, is a hit or miss.

Maybe, but in the time it takes to click the button the value may have changed 5%. Doesn’t seem ideal.

> I can pay my real estate tax with cash. I can go to the store and buy food with cash.

Can you do that in Zimbabwe?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com