That's why currency is not normally treated as an investment. Meanwhile investments like equities have the property that the thing being owned actually makes stuff. Bitcoin seems to be the worst of both worlds.
Nah. With ‘real’ currencies, goods and services are available in that currency. I can happily go about my business and transaction entirely in euros if I’m in the EU.
So what about gold ? I'm waiting for your vlog where you go buy a starbuck with a pound of physical gold and they give you change.
The point is that when there's liquidity smoewhere (on an exchange), any security have "de facto" act as a "money", or at least a "saving account", because there's always at all an actual value defined by the market. whether it's stock, crypto etc... It doesn't have in practive to be tied to a central bank / governement. Even historically, currencies have existed well before someone tried to regulate them
"Entirely" is the keyword.. there are certainly a lot of things you can buy with crypto, but at some point you need to convert it to a 'real' currency to pay for food or gas or server costs or whatever. And if you find a service that lets you buy food with crypto, eventually they will need to pay their suppliers with 'real' money. Everyone needs to keep track of the btc/USD (or whatever coin) exchange rate to ensure there are enough 'real' dollars or euros or whatever at the end of the day. It's a super hard thing to bootstrap a currency, much easier with the force of the state, I doubt there will ever be a truly competitive crypto.
In “real” currency labor is compensated by wages, resulting in a net increase of collective wealth. Building a house generates a net increase in wealth overall; there is “more there” than there was before.
Cryptocurrencies do not share this property. They are zero-sum, which is a hallmark of a Ponzi scheme.