It is money by itself and it can buy things and the merchants accept it as payment. I hope the Pi Core team can find ways for the sellers/merchants to be able to exchange their Pi to fiat or there would be a problem.
As base mining rate decreases every month and mining difficulty increases, Pi coins become scarce. The ecosystem is slowly being integrated with real-life applications for the Pioneers to use Pi as a medium of exchange and many utilities are built. Pi is not meant to be a store of value but a...