Elon Musk is the world’s greatest gift to cryptocurrencies. These “coins”— really little more than lines of code — still have few real-life use cases.
They are handy for laundering money and buying drugs on the internet, and are beloved by the hardcore libertarian and paranoid among us who long to be free from investor protections. But they are only slowly creeping into everyday transactions.
They pay no dividends and give no shareholder rights. They are plagued with scams and spark alarm among environmentalists for the huge amounts of computing power used up in their creation. Their volatile value is only as much as the next person is prepared to pay for them.