Cryptocurrencies perform a necessary and valuable function: serving as a store of value, as a public ledger, and a means of transferring funds.
Here's an example:
You're in Canada and want to buy a $1 million euro beach house in Spain. You're going to spend days or weeks dicking around with forex, international wire transfers, escrow, anti-money laundering hoops, KYC laws, multiple banks, verification that the funds cleared, and trying to explain this entire process to some brain-damaged bankers because they have no idea how to actually do it. And that's assuming you havent been deplatformed by said banks for wrongthink.
With bitcoin you literally just send an agreed upon quantity of satoshis to the recipient's wallet and you're done in minutes or an hour at most.
I get that cryptocurrency is getting a lot of publicity from doge, moon, and HODL memes, but its value is in performing a necessary economic function in a highly efficient way that is vastly superior to previous options.
You could just mail them the equivalent value of beanie babies as well. Crypto doesn't give you a magic wand to waive taxes, forms, and all the other bullshit, you're just deliberately breaking the law by doing so. Which again, you could do with a couple of pallets of beanie babies, (or say a single signed honus wagner baseball card). The advantage of those two is that they still exist when the power goes out and they don't leave a digital trail for the feds to follow.
Could you buy said property with a pallet of beanie babies or gold or what have you? Sure. You'd need to store it at no small cost, ship it, protect it in transit from thieves, have it authenticated on delivery (so you know it's not counterfeit, gold plated lead, etc). That's far more costly and time consuming than cryptocurrency.
In terms of power outages...if the power goes out for a long time on a global basis, then crypto is worthless and you need ammo, MREs, and probably a geigee counter since we're now living in a nuclear wasteland.
The value of crypto can plummet with the world going into nuclear wasteland territory. There is no underlying value to crypto, and without some sort of central authority to prop it up, it can easily crash to zero or at least continue to have such wilds swings in value that it becomes a major obstacle to use as a currency. It is wildly popular as a fad now and prices reflect this, but at some point the fad is going to die down and the price is going to drop again. If the best point you can argue in it's favor is it makes international transactions slightly easier by avoiding exchange rates, what you have is a slightly easier to transport form of baseball cards.
something that loses 30 percent of its ''value'' in a matter of hours is not a store of value.
edit. i love how bittards are downvoating me for pointing out the obvious fact that a speculative medium is not a store of value. downvoating me does not change reality, especially interesting they are unwilling to plead their 'logic'
Volatility doesn't inherently change whether something is a store of value. E.g. last March stocks plunged ~30% overnight and bounced back quickly. Oil prices are also highly volatile.
I think you're confusing short term volatility with long term value. E.g. cryptocurrency is highly volatile in the short term. If your time horizon is dinner time, it's too volatile to be an effective store of value. If your tine horizon is measured in years, then fiat invariably goes to zero while crypto climbs.
price vs value vs store of value. if i threw a bitcoin, 100 fiat federal reserve notes and an ounce of gold into the ocean, which would have value to the organism that discovers them in 100 years? 1000 years?
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