No Stupid Questions

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.

Heating.

But resistive electrical heating is slightly more efficient. Heat pumps are considerably more efficient.

So - buying drugs.

Sure! you can buy lots o things with it, if going through gift cards is ok for you. websites like coinsbee or bitrefill allows you to buy:

• videogames (steam, keyshops etc)
• fuel
• traveling (trains, airplanes)
• food (various supermarkets)
• clothes

and more. I personally tried only videogames and amazon but it worked for me. i have a gift card for IKEA but still need to test it.

Also you don't need to give data aside from a mail so it's pretty private

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.

To be fair all it takes is for enough entities to exchange it between other assets. If you are in Europe, most stores won't sell you anything for your USD unless you exchange it into euros (except some edge cases), so it does feel kinda similar in that sense except cryptos don't really have a "home" country where they're universally accepted (bar some nations whose own currency has so throughly failed they adopted it).

There are some services which allow you to spend crypto by simply doing the exchange for you at the point of purchase into whatever currency the store uses (similar to visa/MasterCard/your bank doing this if you pay by card abroad).

I'll say ultimately though it doesn't change a lot, the idea of crypto is great and there are some where the implementation actually yields something that could be a better money (truly yours, not controlled by a government or a company necessarily, low fees, near instant transactions), but in the end there are just too many of them and they rock the boat too much for the well established financial institutions that they're just doomed IMO.

However, the technology itself I expect will end up being used against us by the ruling class in the coming years (i.e crypto currencies controlled by the government where they can set whatever rules they want on it).

Money laundering and gambling mostly

Buying drugs

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

The most famous transaction was for pizza. Your question is disingenuous baiting.

Cryptocurrency is a decentralized digital currency, it can be used for the same thing as any other digital currency, the difference being that you can use it without relying on a centralized authority like a bank or similar financial institutions.

Yes you can buy pizzas with it, although that's less common nowadays because there are more practical ways to pay for that and you probably don't mind the bank and government to know you buy pizzas.

I thought what made money money was everyone agreed it was valuable and was willing to exchange it for goods and services directly. I don't see that with crypto.

You don't? If I were to offer you 1BTC for your mouse, would you accept it? If you say no you're stupid, if you say yes you confirmed you see it as valuable and are willing to exchange it for goods directly.

I don't think this community is meant for rhetorical questions.

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.

It’s a technology that allows you to verifiably possess a definite quantity of “a thing.” That thing is just virtual.

Think of it this way: shares in companies are also virtual things. You can’t build a bridge out of em.

But a stock exchange is there to sell them to you and they will keep track that yes, you do actually own X shares of company Y.

Instead of issuing shares on a stock exchange to raise money, a new company could just sell shares of itself by creating a new crypto. There would be a finite number of “coins” representing ownership shares. The company could control whether more can be created. And it would be verifiable who owns what.

So that verifying and quantity-control are both features of the software itself. You could say it’s good for those things. As I illustrated above, this could be used to virtualize ownership of something, including the buying and selling of shares of it.

Gambling.

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.