Vote Now | Is cryptocurrency real money?

At least three cryptocurrency exchanges aired ads at the Super Bowl this weekend, as the crypto industry made one of its biggest leaps yet into the mainstream.

But there's a question at the heart of people's confusion over cryptocurrency: If crypto is really money why are advertisements trying to convince people of that?

The writer and producer Noah Garfinkel tweeted on Sunday night, "One reason I still have trouble believing crypto currency is money is that there aren't commercials for money."

Plenty of people agreed with Garfinkel, but in a sign of how unsettled the debate is, the crypto faithful roared back. Two particular replies sum up the level of disagreement.

One pointed out that many other financial products are advertised on TV, which met with the counterargument that products get advertised, currencies don't. Something that needs to be pushed via advertising looks a lot more like a commercial fad than an economic revolution.

Although neither of these arguments hold much water for whether crypto advertisements mean cryptocurrency isn't money, they reveal the confusion that many people still have about the inherent value of digital currencies. How can a cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, with no central authority, have an equivalent value in U.S. currency?

The factors behind Bitcoin's value, for example, are that it's difficult to counterfeit owing to the blockchain, because only 21,000,000 tokens will ever exist, and, most important—because people think it is valuable.

Although Bitcoin has no issuing authority, it does have independent developers around the world that propose upgrades to its open source code and make sure it is maintained regularly. This is similar, although not exactly the same, to the role the Federal Reserve plays in managing the money supply in the U.S.

Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, but according to a report published by economists Aleksander Berentsen and Fabian Schär in the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, it's not the only currency that doesn't.

"State monopoly currencies, such as the U.S. dollar, the euro, and the Swiss franc, have no intrinsic value either," the report said.

But what the Super Bowl showed, maybe more than anything, is that crypto remains just a bit of a joke to many Americans.

Mooers, What do you think about that? Do you think the cryptocurrency is real money? Vote and comment below!