People who think of cryptocurrencies as something to hold, something to invest in miss the point. Crypto is designed to do things that only crypto can do and its value is in its utility, in its use as money.

My name is Ryan, and I am an agorist. Today, we are talking about the point and the utility of cryptocurrencies.

Crypto is all over the news right now. Look one way and you will see news about the wildly high dollar value of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Look another way and you will see news about Ripple, Coinbase, and the state war against crypto. I read about as much crypto news as I can find, but the strangest posts about crypto are those I find on social media.

There is widespread obsession with the price in dollars of cryptocurrencies. You will also regularly hear terms like "investment" and "diversity" and "capital gains" in relation to crypto. I find it frustrating, to say the least.

Cryptocurrencies were created as currencies, not investments. They solve problems that have never before been solved. Until now, there has never been a way to instantly send money to anyone in the world, person to person, without any middle man. With cash, you can do person to person payments easily, but you can only do it locally. With money transfers or card payments, you rely on multiple banks and middlemen to get money from point A to point B, and a bank is always left holding the money, not the individual. Plus, it takes multiple days for a transaction to close.

Gold is great as well, but it has the same usage problems as cash. It only works for local payments, otherwise, you have to trust multiple middlemen. Plus, it has the added problems that it is heavy and difficult to store, plus it is much less divisible than cash unless you are using gold powder and scales, but who has time for that?

People who obsess over the price of crypto and who think of it as an investment completely miss the point. Crypto prices will go up and down in relation to fiat currencies. The big spikes generally come from traditional investment money which shows up just long enough to build a big bubble then gets pulled out at the top causing the dollar value to crash. Sure, cryptocurrencies with limited supply have the potential to steadily go up in value over time as fiat value falls, but ultimately that is irrelevant in terms of day to day usage.

If you want to get rich quick off of crypto, good luck with that. You probably won't. If you want to diversify and invest in crypto like stocks, you may or may not get the return you hope for. If you are hodling tons of crypto and begging others to do the same, then you are missing out on the real benefits of crypto and are no different than any NPC out there living under the thumb of the state and its tightly-controlled and surveilled financial system.

So, stop asking for permission from corrupt financial institutions to use your own money. Stop using systems that you know are being watched and controlled by the state. Stop trusting dozens of financial institutions with your money.

Instead, be free. Use crypto to accomplish what can only be accomplished using crypto. Pay for goods and services directly, hold the keys to your money yourself. When you use cryptocurrencies as money, the temporary value in terms of fiat becomes dramatically less important. Break free of thinking of crypto only in terms of fiat, because it is far better than fiat.

Sure, no cryptocurrency is perfect right now, but that isn't a problem. They are each a step in the right direction. Do you not use SSL/TLS when you browse the web? Sure, TLS isn't perfect, but it is our best option on the clear web right now. When a better alternative arrives, then we can use that instead. Technology is never in a finished state. There is always new innovation around the corner. What we do is use what we have available to us and grow and adapt over time. It works for internet protocols and it works for cryptocurrencies as well.

The best days of crypto are ahead of us, not behind us, and it has nothing to do with the fiat value. The value of cryptocurrencies is in their usage as money.

This is TechnoAgorist episode 49.