Topic: What does cryptocurrency mean to you? (Read 1062 times)

Just replace the term 'crypto currency' with 'swiss army knife' and your parents will understand ... just another tool, like light bulbs, automobiles, antibiotics etc

Re-read what the OP said.
I don't think you understood..

And some think it's about toppling the govt's and sticking it to the man.
Crypto Rebel's unite !

Most care about profit ONLY.
Few care about profit and advancement.

Pretenders galore spewing bullshit 24/7.

Most in here will tell you the value is whatever the market is willing to pay. By that definition ponzi schemes have value too. In fact, most coins have more in common with ponzi schemes than anything else. I prefer a more classical approach towards defining value:

A product or service has value if it offers a significantly enough improvement compared to existing solutions, or if it offers a wanted product or service that did not exist before.

Bitcoin offered that. It made it possible to do international transactions almost for free. The price gap between the existing transaction solutions and bitcoin fee is what gave bitcoin value. And also the speed compared to existing solutions. I'd say bitcoin was a significantly enough improvement.
Most coins offer small or no improvements to bitcoin, and therefore have no value by my definition. (You can still make a truckload of money on them, but it's a greater fool game) There are however also coins that offer significant improvements. Some are working on the scaling issues that we see in bitcoin. Solving that would be a significant improvement. Others, like BitBay or Etherum, are working on offering new and/or significantly improved services, mostly by using smart contracts one way or the other.




Pretty bad for the most part. Crypto is now dominated by people that are trying to get rich quick. But there are good people here too. They are just mostly busy trying to actually develop something, and don't have the time to post in here all day.



I believe it will be just as dominant and integrated in our lifes as the internet. But most of it will be back end, so people will not even know that services use crypto as part of their backbone.

Cryptocurrencies were the one to make a bigger and better service in the financial sector in the future. It has got only the virtual access, which is the one that it makes different from the traditional currency network.

Well to be honest Cryptocurrency has been a part of my daily routine since I joined this community. The people, other bitcoiners, ideas, thoughts, updates, arguments, opinions has been a great help and a big part of myself in earning and in work. Of course the career I've been working on is different from this, but the earnings and sideline jobs here help me go through tough times. Of course this is not enough for me to sustain everything I need but this is a big help.

The Stone age is over and the development of artificial intelligence is taking over the technology. The technological revolution reshaped the world in a way that no one have seen before. This cryptocurrencies is part of that, and I'm glad that the knowledge here can be a great asset for me in the future and can be a shareable knowledge to future generations. Those what really means to you can be a good treasure if we can pass it on.

For myself it means freedom from just centralized monetary and banking systems. Also it means we can express ourselves through the issuance or creation of digital currencies that reflect our personalities and dreams.
It is also much easier to crowdfund various projects on the blockchain and if it is ever adopted by governments, it can root out corruption for good, but hey that's stretching it a bit lol. 

For me cryptocurrencies means only 1 thing- the future

I almost agree about the first one but I would say the value is never real. Well, we can consider the price of electricity and miners and calculate the 'real value' but it doesn't matter at all. As for the second one, the money itself has no ethics. Nevertheless, the users' behaviour leaves some trace on the currency which can be considered as the currencie's ethics. For instance, btc ethics was really bad when it became popular as it was highly involved in the dark market business. Litecoin is rather famous as a casino cryptocurrency than dark market one, so its ethics is a bit better and so on.

Basically a thing has value because of the person or consumer is giving it to him. Some items have a long term value into it eg. Gold while some are based on trends eg. clothing apparel. Just like Cryptocurrencies the value it has right now is based on the users who are using it the demand of it change a lot because it is not like a regular currency in which a lot of people in a country is using unlike Fiat Currency. You can tell your parents that it is some kind of basic economics the law of supply and demand.

For it's to make X10 everytime I invest at coin  So I can make big money here instead somewhere else.

Cryptocurrency to me is strictly an investment

Bitcoin - I can buy things with however ...

all of the rest is just a gamble at this point in time

Understand correctly, your parents will find it hard to change their minds.

fiat value is not based anymore on commodities, this is an old wrong belief, fait value is determinated by your government and central bank who print them, in crypto it's only based by supply and demand, which is why it's more unstable, but also less controlled and more free

in my opinion, the value of cryptocurrency is helping us to make money and make more bitcoin. i think crypto currency will be as balancing and controlling for bitcoin to not to high for now and later.

i think its about to make one clear solution for better economic and maybe with crypto currency, we can be united. and i think its really genuine innovation with positive intent and i am sure that every crypto currency has a good purpose behind of the coins.

we all know that every crypto currency need internet connection to be used and without internet, there is no way for us to receive or spend crypto currency that we have. i think the present of crypto currency can push internet more grow from now on and we can see that internet connection in every places so we can used crypto currency in daily life.

Cheers for the responses! 

Yeah I think value was what really got me .... I understand supply and demand and as more people accept crypto it will in turn build desired value .... but I think their question was more related to it's physical / intrinsic value.  For example:  Fiat's value is based on commodities like gold and silver and coins were minted to represent this value ...

In generally you just need to read more. All answers are already written.

1. Value is always as much buyer and seller value it. Most current crypto coins value is speculative. Tiny bit is real.  Specially ICO coins was issued with different reason. More liek a share of a project then an actually money.   So you need to ask yourself this question at exact currency.

2. Cryptocurency have no ethic. It is money. Money have no ethic.  People that are using money have them. If they dont respect society or laws is ofcourse bad. They will get punished for it sooner or latter. I am sure everyone was already taught this.

3. It is simple they just will. Now since is so new ofcourse dont fit so well. Structure will modify to accept it. Most think that with crypto is end of governments collecting taxes. that si far from true. They will just adopt to collect them where tehy can. And they will be happy doing it since there wil be way more GDP to collect taxes from.

one important thing to remember apart from all these questions is that you shouldn't confuse Bitcoin as a real cryptocurrency with altcoins which call themselves a cryptocurrency.

a crypto-currency is a currency that is based on secure cryptography and encryption techniques.
bitcoin is the example of a real currency which is also decentralized which makes it valuable.

the value comes from supply and demand. this demand however can be real, based on real world usage. such as what bitcoin has and you can find things that you can actually buy with bitcoin, or it is only traders demand for playing with the price and making profit from the ups and downs and this is what happens with altcoins.

i don't exactly know what to say about "ethics"!

in the future, as we can see the only real cryptocurrency (bitcoin) is slowly making a way for itself and it is getting adopted more by a wide variety of services and merchants.
the technology (blockchain technology) also is being adopted as it is open source by many copycat altcoins to pump and dump as i said above and make profit and also by many banks and financial institutes to use the benefits of it.

Just had an interesting conversation with the parents tonight. 

They're old school and not of the information technology era as are a lot of that generation.  I was telling them about my journey into cryptocurrency and the enjoyment of learning about and investing in something new and exciting.  As we were chatting, they asked me some pretty deep questions in their quest to understand this new medium more, which I had trouble giving a straight answer too.  I thought I'd post them here to see what others have in response to them:

- What is the value of cryptocurrency?  ( not what coins are worth but what is the physical value of it or what gives it value ?)

- What are the overall ethics of cryptocurrency?  ( Good or Bad , is it a bunch of people just trying to make money with little respect to society and laws or is it genuine innovation with positive intent ?)

- Where/How will cryptocurrency fit into the structure of the world going forward ?



All pretty deep questions and not something that the average crypto investor is generally thinking about when there is gains to be had.... 

Food for thought :-)