[Pollard]

There’s supposed to be some utility in crypto. I saw a video with four guys on four different continents and they sent $100 USDC, around the world on the ALGO network in less than two minutes at a cost of $0.40 or $0.10 per peer to peer transaction.

You can’t do that with USD that cheap and $100 in Bitcoin might have been $90 in Bitcoin two minutes later.

That’s one use of stable coins. Another is if some financial/crypto news comes out and you think the crypto market is going to tumble because of the news, you can convert your non-stable coin to stable coin as a safe haven and it costs less than cashing out to USD.

[Svartalfiar]

There’s supposed to be some utility in crypto. I saw a video with four guys on four different continents and they sent $100 USDC, around the world on the ALGO network in less than two minutes at a cost of $0.40 or $0.10 per peer to peer transaction.

You can’t do that with USD that cheap and $100 in Bitcoin might have been $90 in Bitcoin two minutes later.

That’s one use of stable coins. Another is if some financial/crypto news comes out and you think the crypto market is going to tumble because of the news, you can convert your non-stable coin to stable coin as a safe haven and it costs less than cashing out to USD.

There could be that utility with regular money, but different governments are always trying to grab their slice of the pie. Sure, I do agree that crypto currencies have some benefits like the ability to easily transfer money around the world in seconds, but that's not enough reason to value it at the ridiculous values many of them have. The only reason it's cheaper than switching to dollars is because the institutions choose to charge those prices. Converting bitcoin to either is the same physical cost as most of it's electronically transacted anyway. Dollars don't have to cost more than dollar coins.

But a big part of my point is in my post above: they aren't practical for actual daily use because that value is so unstable. Ignoring ones like bitcoin, what happens to dollar coins if they replace dollars? Dollars disappear, now there's nothing (or a worthless something) for the dollar coins to be tied to, leading to them freefalling exactly the same. Those stable coins are still dependent on national currency for their stability.