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I’ve never been a crypto bull. To me, crypto is a solution in search of a problem.

Here are just a few of the issues I see with it:

• It was supposed to be an alternative currency, but it’s rarely used for transactions except by terrorists and hackers.
• It’s supposed to be a store of value, but it is very volatile.
• The most well-known crypto, Bitcoin, was made up by some mysterious guy in Japan. That hardly seems like the basis for a currency.

On Sunday, I got together with a group of friends to celebrate one of their birthdays. One of my buddies recently started working in a crypto-related business and just got back from the Bitcoin conference in Nashville, where former President Donald Trump said he wants to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the planet.”

I peppered my friend with questions and offered my arguments against crypto – not to bash his business and prove that I’m right, but to see where I might be wrong and try to learn something.

Another friend, who’s also a crypto bull, jumped into the discussion.

“I think of Bitcoin like I think of gold. It’s a store of value,” he said. “But it’s much easier to store, transport, and transact with than bars of gold.”

We discussed how the dollar may lose its status as the global reserve currency and acknowledged that if that occurs, we may face a real currency crisis in the United States. None of us have ever experienced a currency crisis in the U.S. We have no idea what that would look like.

“I hope my Bitcoin doesn’t go to $500,000 or $1 million, because that would mean everything else has gone to $%&!” my friend exclaimed.

Like crypto itself, my thoughts on crypto are evolving.

Is it a store of value? It can be – just as much as anything else can. That includes anything that someone is willing to trade currency, goods, or services for, like comic books, baseball cards, rare coins, stamps, art, and many other items.

If people accept that it’s a store of value, it’s a store of value. A bar of gold has little utility, but if society says it’s worth $2,000, at that moment, it’s worth $2,000. The same is true for Bitcoin.

Speaking of utility, very few individuals and businesses are making transactions with Bitcoin, but more are starting to. In fact, Trump claims that his campaign has received $25 million in crypto donations, which perhaps explains his shift on cryptocurrency. (He was against it during his presidency.)

Crypto can also be easily used for transactions across borders.

A person in the U.S. who wanted to send money to a family member in another country used to have to go to Western Union, pay a big fee, and wire the cash. Today, they can simply transfer some cryptocurrency to their relative’s digital wallet by paying less than a dollar. (Crypto is hardly the only option, though – you can easily transfer money through PayPal and other services as well.)

Given that today’s money is almost all digital anyway, I rarely have much cash on me or in my house. If I have $10,000 in the bank, it’s because my bank says so. If my bank says I don’t have $10,000, I have a problem.

So crypto really isn’t that different from a digital currency, with the exception being that it’s a lot easier to store crypto at home on a disk than it is to bury your money or gold in the backyard or stash it in the walls of your house.

I’m certainly no cheerleader for crypto, and I still find many serious faults with it. But my thoughts on the subject are evolving, and I’m looking forward to continuing to dig into it. At the very least, it will be a useful mental exercise.

Sometimes people change. I used to hate Brussels sprouts – now I can’t get enough of them.

Will the same thing happen for crypto?

We’ll see.

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