At least old Confederate money is really for really real worth something as a museum display.

The fees are the key, an totally unneeded, useless drain on the system, telling you who is really making the money.

Right on target Doc. They have proliferated this whole crypto currency thing, not realizing that ALL currencies have been doing this for the longest time, since they all left the Gold Standard. The whole point of it was security, which never panned out for me, as I thought : Why would I need a secure currency no one accepts? Then when it gets to the acceptance part, you ask: whys is it worth what it is worth? Answer: It's not, except in peoples heads, just like our current crop of fiat. Nope. I'll pass.....

See here for the Top 100 cryptos: https://coinmarketcap.com/
Click the column headers to toggle the sorting (high to low) for Market Cap, Daily delta, etc.
You can click the left-most tab near the top of the grid and choose All.
Give it several seconds to load.
Then scroll ... you will see that there are over 1400 of these things.
Last I checked, the Total Market Cap is just north of $500 Billion (USD).
The "market" took a nosedive yesterday after S. Korea (and China?) were going to outlaw the use of cryptos.
Lots of these cryptos come into being through the "ICO" -- Initial Coin Offering process.
I was reading up on sundry cryptos and ICOs ... many of these founders are in their 20's and live a sort of "dorm room life." The whole thing gives new air to the phrase "funny money."

A couple days ago, G. Edward Griffin (author of The Creature from Jekyll Island) was hosting an online program with the topic of Cryptos and how Central Banking Cartels are infiltrating the crypto-world, essentially by creating and providing centralized "hubs" that act as intermediaries between crypto traders. These hubs will host a ledger of owned coins and act as low-cost clearinghouses. Long story short, it's very much like traditional fee-for-service banking.
See here for Red Pill University -- lots of material here that may be of interest to Gulchers: https://redpilluniversity.org/

The whole crypto-world is a fantastic financial house of cards built on a sum of zeroes.

$5Au stands corrected. 😔

That reminds me...my cousin Vinny and I need to get down to Vegas to pick up all those phony ATMs we placed around there...

First Class letter rates went down from 49 to 47 cents in April 2016, then back up to 49 cents in January 2017. Hope no speculators lost their shirts! :-)

Bitcoin is a gigantic Ponzi scheme. The only owners who have a chance of becoming wealthy are gambling that the public will remain stupid about the so-called "currency", hoping to withdraw their wealth in real currency before it performs a collapse worthy of a black hole.

It amazes me that anyone disgusted with fiat currency would buy into this fantasy, but as Barnum said, "There's a sucker born every minute."

My friend and I talk about this. We own some coins. I prefer LTC and Ethereum, which I own, which just got crushed today...

So, the belief is that the fees on BTC or too high for anything BUT storage of wealth. And Large Purchases. It cannot be used to buy a cup of coffee, and it cannot handle the transactions per day required to replace a Credit Card.

In comes Etherum(ETH) and LiteCoin (LTC). They don't have the same limitations in block sizes, and they have lower fees by design.

The fees are going to be the problem for all of these things. They need to be down to 1% or it makes little sense transactionally.

I have heard that Amazon is going to start taking LTC, and they are really trying to build up the payment processing side.

My final concern is bad transactions. Credit Cards can UNDO a transaction, and take the money back from a Creepy Vendor. That is not an option with this stuff. And that makes it hard.

I think that last piece is going to have to be handled by someone in order to make this work.

Otherwise, losing your "wallet" means you have lost everything. I am not sure how many Americans will want to live with that much risk!

The volatility is a lot of fun though :-)

I have a BitCoin Wallet and tried to send 0.001 BTC to my CoinBase account. It cost me 0.0012 to send so I actaully paid 0.0022 to send 0.001 BTC. Fees are getting outrageous, I have a mining contract with Genesis Mining and they keep raising what it takes for them to send me the BTC that my contract pays out because the fees are getting so big. It started at 0.001 BTC to send, then it went to 0.0025, now it is 0.005 before they will send it to my wallet. If you say I am foolish, well, I invested $300 in the mining contract and over 3 years I have received over $7000 worth of BTC that I have used to buy a bigger contract and cashed out. The 0.001 that I sold out of my CoinBase account is more than the original $300.

And yes, there's one born every minute!

Bitcoin is backed by, well nothing. Buying Forever stamps bets on future postal rate increases. Rather slow way to profit but very stable as the USPS never lowers First Class rates.

I am more ignorant on the subject than I'd like. How can the post office created forever stamps be the backing for a bitcoin which generates profits for someone else? The whole thing, to me, sounds shady, like selling air to someone.

$5Au's daughter, $7Ag, saves $ via Bitcoin when buying prescription meds from India. Meanwhile her father has been extracting $ from knuckleheads paying too much for Bitcoin via GBTC. He's also been working on a new crypto-cuerrency, "Stampcoin," backed by Forever stamps.