But some 5 million householdsdon’thave bank accounts.
So every two years, theFederal Deposit Insurance Corporationconducts a survey to find out why.
Is it a trust thing?
From the start, the dream for crypto has always been “be your own bank.”
With funds like that, who needs banks?
The answer turns out to be: nearly everyone.
Only 4.8% of all households owned or used crypto, theFDIC’s surveyfound.
Among unbanked households, it was even lower: just a bit over 1%.
Crypto has been around since 2009.
Why hasn’t cryptocurrency turned into actual currency, as its pioneers predicted?
The purpose of money is to serve as a medium of exchange.
To store value, it has tohavevalue.
But that definition clearly doesn’t work anymore.
Gold fits the definition, but we don’t use gold as money much these days.
(It’s heavy.)
And if you think about it, no legal-tender currency really has any intrinsic value.
It’s what we as a society agree to agree on.
And we don’t agree that crypto is all that.
Quite a lot, actually.
But its price volatility and peer-to-peer, algorithmic nature feel fundamentally sketchy to normies.
That’s not a good look for a “social technology.”
Money is like Tinker Bell: Everyone has to believe in it, or it dies.
That’s why it’s easy to acquire and trade cryptocurrency but pretty much impossible tobuyanything with it.
“I can’t buy groceries with a cryptocurrency right now.”
Now, the people who do believe in crypto believe hard.
But their faith in it is as something to own, to increase their wealth.
“It’s not a means of payment.
It’s not exactly a store of value.
It’s hugely volatile.
It’s more of a casino chip.”
In 2021, the government of El Salvadormade bitcoin legal tender.
People could pay their taxes with it, and businesses were required to accept it.
Yet bitcoinstilldidn’t turn into money.
Nearly a third of Salvadorans surveyed in early 2022 said they’dnever heard of the wallet app.
Most people who downloaded the app turned the bonus into dollars and spent them.
In December, the government announced it wasratcheting back its bitcoin initiatives.
In fact, the simple existence of the dollar is one of crypto’s biggest challenges.
The United States already has a very good, stable currency and a solid banking system.
As the FDIC notes, 95.8% of households in its survey had checking or savings accounts.
Beyond money laundering, crypto doesn’t do anything better than dollars and banks.
The Trump administration is clearly intent on greasing the wheels for crypto.
If that happens, she adds, “we might see bitcoinization.”
But until then, cryptocurrencies will remain less about banking and more about making bank.
Adam Rogersis a senior correspondent at Business Insider.
