I can move my assets across borders instantaneously and exchange them for local currency whenever I need it. There is value in digital assets that are not bound to any jurisdiction.
And yeah, you can use MasterCard until you hit your daily withdrawal limit, or your account is frozen, or your transactions are flagged and reversed and you have to explain why you want to spend your own money a certain way.
Mastercard doesn't have a daily withdrawal limit. Bitcoin requires access to both your wallet and whatever security paraphernalia you have set up around accessing it. If you lose access or it's compromised you're out all that coin unlike a credit card, and you're burning massive amounts of fossil fuels for these "conveniences".
Conversely, bitcoin and other similar cryptocurrencies, whichever collective burns more than half of all computational resources, gets to wage economic war on anyone else.
By extension this also includes them getting the ability to undo transactions they don't like, which is actually a genuinely useful thing, despite being used as totemic example by pro-crypto people against fiat currencies.
But there is no upper bound to this connected to any underlying asset, so a K2 Dyson swarm does exactly the same number of BTC transactions as the current network, and that number isn't enough for even just the daily fast food purchases in Berlin.
Conversely, the US military cost is basically "how much do we want to spend to defend our country and way of life?" to which the answer is "lots, but not too much".
There are many pro's and con's on both sides. Crypto's unique and fills a niche it built for itself. People have mocked it, attacked it, misrepresented it and underestimated it for over a decade now. It's still here, and it's still growing hugely.
I think you need to back up the claim that it's growing hugely. Both Ethereum and Bitcoin are down a great deal from their recent highs, that seems contra-indicative of growth. If the argument here is that there are tons of new types of coins being constantly created then sure, I believe that, but I don't know the value of all those new coins that are at the moment used primarily for speculation and will never have the momentum required to break into any sort of mainstream adoption.
The first of those is the most important and impactful, in that economic theory has not, to date, been adequately updated for a world where labour markets can suddenly be replaced in their entirety by a few lines of python.
Or a world where manual labour can be downloaded, printed-out and assembled autonomously. It isn't here yet, but is not too far away, all the various bits are being created as we speak. The shift has to be away from a labour-based economy.
This is because labour value will drop to zero eventually. So we need another way to distribute generated value. It's a bit of a mess and large experimentation is going on - but crypto is at least in there touching those things.
As for growing hugely:
Crypto is reliably volatile, and also reliably exponential in its general growth. The linear charts look horrific, but the logarithmic versions are quite stable. This is the only way - historically - to measure its growth accurately:
https://www.coingecko.com/en/global-charts (select logarithmic)
Given the final point on the chart represents about $1.2 trillion, you can see there's a large amount of exponential momentum there. ("Technically" it could go to zero overnight, but it seems unlikely... the NASDAQ technically could too.)
But who is generating what value? In a world where the value of labour drops to zero what is the value? Crypto's value is pure speculation. How does it actually solve that issue better than any other value when there's no value? The implication here is that somehow crypto will become a means to its own end, but why is that? Again, it doesn't solve the problem of labour having no value. What makes it a better fit?
If you look at that coin gecko graph and look over the last two years there has been no growth, regardless of the scale.
When there's no labour to drive the economy, something else will be driving the economy. An economy, in it's purest form may be: a system that exchanges things, and also provides a store for latency in those events.
Note I'm saying "may be". We're talking about rewriting theory here. That is, we need to theorise, and hope we get it right, or at least come up with something useful.
Assuming that, what would be the value generated in a labour-less economy? Again, we can only guess at this stage, just as we could in the 90's about what impact the internet might have. Nobody predicted where we are exactly now.
The fundamental thing many can't seem to get past with crypto is that people involved in it seem to want to, and often-times succeed, in generating value for themselves, out of what's tantamount to nothing.
How people cope with this apparently alien concept (from the point of view of labour's value being an essential dogma), is to focus on all of the times that value was in fact generated out of others misfortune. (As happens also.)
But, it's not the whole story, and, misses the forest for the trees. You can type a sentence and create a beautiful work of art, or ask a question and get an answer that condenses years of knowledge into a reply. The same way an NFT creates money.
It's not necessarily always a "scam" that labour-less endeavour can create value now. It's where society and technology has been heading for decades. But it's a huge cultural, social, political and economic shift.
It is inevitable that such changes provoke visceral averse responses, suspicion, failure to understand, etc. This will likely go on for some time before the future emerges. Crypto pushing all these buttons is a good sign.
Doesn't mean it's definitely the future - but, is there another contender with similar disruptive characteristics in all the necessary areas? Only AI but as yet it doesn't have a transactional exchange or latency store for generated value as crypto does.
> If you look at that coin gecko graph and look over the last two years there has been no growth, regardless of the scale.
Look over it again, it does that regularly.
It's expected behaviour for a highly volatile asset to retrace its previous levels. The important aspect is that despite this, its linear and logarithmic trend are both constantly increasing across the time series.
Can you use your MasterCard to pay a Russian person?