• Bonehead@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    So they did actually make a legitimate currency, but the value doesn’t come from belief. It comes from blackmail.

    Kinda sorta, but not really. Cryptocurrency’s real value comes from people willing to trade it in exchange for real items. Unfortunately these items tended to be drugs in the beginning. Once someone was able to buy that first pizza with Bitcoin is when it became legitimized. As long as people are willing to exchange it for real items, it’s a legitimate currency.

    • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      Once someone was able to buy that first pizza with Bitcoin is when it became legitimized. As long as people are willing to exchange it for real items, it’s a legitimate currency.

      He paid someone else in Bitcoin, but that person bought the pizza in USD. Even today, no major business is accepting direct crypto payments for anything besides publicity stunts. There are, however, plenty of services which automate what happened in the “crypto pizza” case: they’ll convert it to USD for you so that you can say the transaction was kinda sorta done via crypto.