And I would put gold and diamonds in the same bin as cryptocurrencies - a waste of resources that achieves very little good, beyond their industrial uses.
Stocks are headed that way. The original use of providing capital to productive enterprise has waned.
Paper money is still overwhelmingly used to facilitate legitimate trade, though obviously on a decline.
This is a disingenuous comment, all of those other things are primarily used for something else; so you either miss the point he's making or you're being unnecessarily pedantic.
Making an overly generalizing statement of a revolutionary technology based on how some people use them in just the first few years they were invented ("cryptocurrencies are used for bad things") is disingenuous and disregards their future potential.
Well hey, I'm annoyed by people who think their delusions of what something could be is the same thing as reality. I'm a huge fan of crypto, but the OP is correct about what it currently is and who's mostly using it. Demanding evidence of people's experience with things is just a cheap cop out to avoid discussion. Anyone involved in the space knows the value is largely speculation driven at this point and if you need that proven to you, then you don't know the tech or the community well enough to be conversing about it.
"Anyone involved in the space knows the value is largely speculation"
I agree value appears to be driven a lot by speculation, but you are changing subject. We were talking about usage. It's pretty obvious from payment processors, from people in the industry (have you ever attended a Bitcoin conference and talked to users? I have), from usage metrics (increasing tx rate, which is normally not related to speculators, as buying and leaving coins on exchange doesn't create a tx), and from other sources, that usage of cryptos is growing.
So, no, you can't say you "just know" cryptocurrencies aren't used by anyone.
PS: I am a crypto dev, wrote miners, founded TAV (mining ASIC integrator), and have been in the Bitcoin industry for 7 years. I know a thing or two.
I agree usage is growing, but that is not the topic. Most coins are moving not because of usage but because of speculation, people are buying largely because of speculation, trading because of speculation, and selling because of speculation; the majority of transaction volume is not coming from using Bitcoin as a currency to buy goods and services, it's from speculators entering the market due to the price rise.
* gold, diamond, stocks, paper money, etc. would also fit the bill