“Crypto is worthless!” — and so is fiat money. A short reflection on value.

Fun etymology first:

The word 'fiat' comes from Latin and means “let it be so” or “it shall be.”

Fiat money is, quite literally, money that has value because we agreed it has value.

A €20 bill is not useful because of the paper it’s printed on. You can’t eat it, you can’t build a house with it. It works because we trust the system behind it and because everyone else accepts it.

So when people say: “Cryptocurrencies have no inherent value,” they’re kind of right.

But the same is true for most money we use every day.

The better question is not: “Does it have intrinsic value?”

The real question is: What is it useful for?

Crypto and blockchain are useful because they let people:

- send value across the world, fast and without asking permission,

- own digital assets without relying on one company or one bank,

- and verify things instead of just trusting one central authority.

That doesn’t mean every coin is valuable. Far from it.

There is a lot of hype, noise, and nonsense in crypto. Just like there are bad companies and bubbles in the regular financial world.

But saying “crypto is worthless” is a bit like saying “the internet is useless because there are scams and clickbait.”

The technology can still be meaningful, even if many uses are bad or speculative.

Money is a tool.

Value is a shared belief plus real-world usefulness.

From that angle, crypto isn’t magic money.

But as a global, digital, open system for moving and owning value, it clearly offers something new — and that’s where its real value might live.