President-elect Donald Trump has now found yet another way to convince his followers to throw their money his way — this time with a questionable cryptocurrency venture.Axios is reporting that the soon-to-be 47th president of the United States has rolled out a "meme coin" dubbed $TRUMP, which is bei...
  • Revan343
    33·
    5 hours ago

    Cryptocurrency is inevitably either instantly converted to money once someone gets it, or it’s held onto under the assumption it’ll be worth more later.

    Money has value because it gets you “stuff”. Cryptocurrency has value because it gets you money.

    With one notable exception…when it is actually used as a medium of exchange, to buy drugs on the internet. (Which the vast majority of crypto is not used for, especially shitcoins like Trump’s scam.)

    • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
      2·
      34 minutes ago

      Crypto can be used at regular merchants as well. It’s very handy for avoiding interchange fees, and annoying bank rules. For instance, my own bank will not allow me to make any purchases with a vendor outside of the US, even if I call them and try to pre-authorize it; their excuse is that there’s too much fraud. That means that if i want to buy, for instance, military surplus apparel and equipment from Czechia that I have to find a company that uses a US payment processor, or find someone that’s importing the surplus that I want, rather than going directly to the source. If I want a surplus Czech OM-90 gas mask, it’s about $400 new through a US distributor, and about $50 or less (…plus shipping) if I buy one directly from Czechia. Even allowing for the relatively small mining fees with crypto, and the costs of shipping, buying direct with crypto ends up being much cheaper than using a US distributor, or trying to find a bank that doesn’t either prevent foreign transactions or charge usurious fees for them.