No Stupid Questions

It's an excellent waste of electricity and computational resources

Just one point to add: there is no currency that is universally accepted. You probably cant buy a pizza with Kuwaiti dinar right now either. But that’s definitely a currency. So your part about “everyone agrees” is not really true of any currency. They work only for a subset of humanity who mutually agree it has value. And you can absolutely find people who will buy crypto from you using other currencies, or give you goods and services for it. Those people are rather randomly distributed around the world though instead of being grouped inside one geographic border. That’s the only difference.

Money laundering, it's really good for that

It's useful for sending money internationally in situations that would be otherwise difficult

You can use Monero to buy things anonymously. Whilst not perfect, it makes it significantly harder to identity or trace you. Other than that, not really, that's the only real use case for crypto in my opinion, for privacy

Crypto is mostly useful for extralegal activities.

You can technically donate for some services with it, but to acquire crypto you need to either KYC to some exchange which isn't not only a massive pain, but there are very serious privacy implications with it. Or you can acquire it via other means which means you will be buying it at high prices.

Also note that most cryptocurrencies aren't anonymous, every transaction is public in the block chain and can be traced back to you.

So if you really know what you're doing you can use privacy coins as a tool to transfer money anonymously, but that's pretty much it's only real world application.

Also, from what I understand (I'm no cryptographer) cryptocurrencies use public key cryptography so quantum computers may in the future break all cryptocurrencies and well deanonymise all previously anonymous privacy coins transactions stored in the blockchains.

Crime, mostly.

It's good for buying things online when your bank has an overly strict fraud detection system that blocks legitimate purchases because the seller is in a different country or whatever.

It was (briefly) useful for buying and selling illicit substances.

Anecdotally, I've heard that trans people use it to buy hormones because HRT is usually not covered by national healthcare or insurance, so the people selling them aren't doing so fully entirely technically legally.

You can donate to private trackers with it, they already figure out how to convert it to fiat and take care of hosting

Buying drugs

I found crypto earlier than some. (not everyone -- if I had more I wouldnt have to work anymore, haha!)

IMHO, the main value proposition of crypto is permissionless peer-to-peer payments. If we both have crypto wallets, and you send me an address to make a payment to, I can send that without needing anyone's approval first. I don't need any bank to agree to have me as a customer first, or any government to approve why the transaction is taking place. All I need is a functioning payment network, and the original Bitcoin white paper solved how to provide that and preserve anonymity. (Really Pseudo-anonymity, but only the nerds and Monero shills care about the difference)

As an academic experiment regarding permissionless payments, it is a resounding success. But, it turns out, Governments have laws regarding who can pay who, and about scamming people, regardless of the medium. So, just because Bitcoin enables permissionless payments doesn't mean you can pay whomever you want, or makes scams somehow permissible.

Furthermore, the rapid increase in crypto prices really doomed any chance at all for useful adoption. Because people don't want to spend crypto anymore. They view it as a Store of Value, and who can blame them, given how it has risen from nothing to a > $2T market cap, even after the recent downturn? You used to be able to use crypto in regular transactions, but not anymore.

In the distant past I used to pay for my phone bill with Bitcoin that I earned through various side jobs. That ended up being convenient because my VOIP company was based in a different country as were the side jobs. But later the transaction costs for Bitcoin rose and it didn't make sense.

You wrote that money is money because everyone agrees it's valuable. But if I go to a pizza place in New York City and try to pay in Thai baht, they probably won't take it. Therefore, it's not money... But of course it's money. It's just not the right kind of money for that place.

It lets people buy illegal stuff (like drugs or HRT), which can be good and bad.
It's possible to buy gift cards for different services with it.

The first real-world transaction with bitcoin was a pizza funnily enough.

Short answer: No.

It's great for sending money abroad. No bank, minimal fees. I use it for that all the time, to send friends gifts for weddings and birthdays and stuff.

Yes, this requires everyone in the transaction to be on the network and know how to sell cryptocurrency; the question is whether it's useful, not whether it's useful with no caveats 😋

Bitcoin alone uses more electricity than Norway.

And that electricity is mostly from burning coal, so crypto is great for creating global warming

Buying hormones for diy hrt

Very low fee cross-border (remittance) transfers using stablecoins (cryptoassets that are pegged to a fiat currency like the dollar) allow people to avoid getting ripped off by companies like Western Union.

On crypto platforms like Ethereum that support smart contracts (basically computer programs that run on the blockchain and allow you to automate transfers etc), you can provide liquidity to money markets and asset exchange platforms and earn many times the interest yield (APY) of what you might get at a bank for a similar thing (like 12-60% vs 2-5%). If you’re a real finance nerd you can also access various exotic financial instruments on other platforms that otherwise wouldn’t be available to you unless you were at a huge investment bank or hedge fund and even some that aren’t possible there. These are often called DeFi platforms (Decentralized Finance)

Another huge use of crypto networks are money laundering and scams though so beware. It’s still a largely unregulated black market. Never put more money into a crypto network than you can afford to lose.

My understanding is this. Let's say Valve accepted crypto payments. If they did, they wouldn't need to go through middlemen payment processors like Visa and Mastercard that can use their influence to dictate what games can and can't be published on Steam.

But yeah the way it works in practice seems to make crypto a commodity, not a currency.

Gambling.

Is a question still rhetorical if you're wrong? Because you absolutely can buy a pizza and pay bills with it, you've been able to for years. You can also get paid in it, you've been able to for years.

Just because you choose not to, doesn't mean you can't.

Sometimes it's expensive or difficult to send money between two countries, depending on which countries they are. But if you know how to send crypto, it's the same process and price no matter where it's going.