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US dollars are bits of paper you can exchange for stuff based on people's perception of their value.

Cryptocurrency is virtual bits of paper that you can exchange for stuff based on people's perception of their value.

There are some similarities there.

Actually not quite - dollars themselves are worth nothing, same way meters, or liters are worth nothing. They purely a convenience unit of measurement, so that a baker selling bread to a plumber doesn't first have to find flour mill that needs plumbing services to make the transaction.

Crypto is by design made artificially scarce, largely because people don't understand the first point. This is also why no one besides dark web ehm "shoppers" actually transacts with crypto.

All currency is worth nothing until it is worth something, and even that will change over human history. Crypto is as artificially scarce as any currency, except the scarcity is baked into clear rules in the protocol that cannot be arbitrarily changed by a single centralized actor. Some people actually like this model.

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