Not really. In fact, permissioned blockchains are already being researched by big banks (I know someone working on this) to solve certain problems related to the integrity of financial records. It is not hard to imagine revival of ecash [1] coupled with a distributed ledger and a threshold blind signature system for issuing the currency.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash

Yes he missed something: the context of bitcoin invention during the 2008 crisis. One of the big incentive to own something like bitcoin (or any decentralized and distributed cryptocurrency) is that it allows to emancipate yourself completely from financial institution either public (the central banks) or private (retail banks) when it comes to managing your capital, hell the "be your own bank".

This is something especially important considering we live in a world where nation-states are increasingly weak, politicians are either seen as incompetent at dealing with economic issue or just straight up overpowered by transnational entities while people are more and more nomad (not hesitating to just abandon their countries for another one when they are not satisfied instead of trying to enhance it). The problem with this trend is that currently moving your capital with you is hard (e-banking is a progress but it's still not enough for most people, especially the poorest).

Finally there is this economic warfare aspect, not all countries are like the USA where the currency is a tool for global hegemony and a fundamental pillar of the state, in fact with the EU we have strong countries which for the first time in history have willfully abandoned their monetary sovereignty (they still keep control but it's not one-sided). Best examples of this dynamic is Japan which has seen the yen bleed badly during the last decades and is the first big country to have a pro-cryptocurrency attitude.

"it allows to emancipate yourself completely from financial institution"

No, it means trusting Bitcoin exchanges in addition to your bank, because at the end of the day you still need to at least get enough money to pay your taxes. So until you live under a government that recognizes Bitcoin as money, you still need to cash out at least sometimes. Even if you somehow have no taxes to pay, you still need to do business with people who do, and they are either going to demand the government's money or they are going to take the relative value of Bitcoin to that money into account when setting prices.

You seem to underestimate the power of governments, especially when it comes to money. Governments tend to enforce laws dealing with taxes and debts, and those are the laws that give fiat currency its value.

"Japan...is the first big country to have a pro-cryptocurrency attitude"

Ironically, Japan is also the source of the clearest example of the role of debt laws in determining the value of money:

https://qz.com/1003609/bitcoins-soaring-price-means-mt-gox-c...

TLDR: MtGox is paying its creditors in Yen, despite having lost their BTC, because of the debt laws in Japan.

Right now you have to cash out but the endgame is to not have to, just like in the early 00s it was a hassle to buy something online and doing your taxes or accessing government services was science fiction while now you can almost live alone without ever going out of your home required you have an internet access because even the grocery store can be visited by internet.

But sure, the governments as today can easily cripple cryptocurrencies if they decide to and I'm not underestimating their power but as I said there is a competition between states, if my country adopts a hostile behavior toward cryptocurrencies then I'm pretty sure another country with a more lenient attitude will be happy to welcome my capital and workforce (not really a new concept, it was already like that with huguenots 400 years ago and it weakened badly the top dog that France while boosting immensely second or third ranked powers like England and Prussia).

I think the leaders in first world countries already understood that, that's why the general attitude is to say "it's none of our business" right now, especially in places like Europe or Japan which kind of missed the first wave of the "third industrial revolution" like internet is called by regulating too much or having a top-down approach to develop the sector and in result got crushed by the USA.

In short: ban cryptos at your own risk.

Oh great government can issue us currency we cant see and track everything we do.

Ecash has privacy.

Sort of, however it can bring full transactional traceability in a very transparent, open manner. That's better than what we have today. I mean, at a basic level even extracting your own account data from a bank is extremely tedious if you stay within their terms of use (i.e don't use yodlee etc)!

Isn't most money used as purely digital anyway? When you get a mortgage, it's not like $300k of physical money changes hands.

So at a basic level quite a few (most) transactions are happening on a digital, abstract level anyway, so really the question is can blockchain be used to improve this model, and is there sufficient incentive for existing players to do so, or is there enough opportunity for someone else to come in and do so.

I think the former is what we're seeing banks start to explore today, while BTC and other cryptocoins have been exploring the latter.

There are some proposals to have the 300k be actually created by the central bank.

For example the Vollgeld initiative in Switzerland: https://www.vollgeld-initiative.ch/english/

One of the logical extension is to allow anyone to have an account at the central bank, also combining those approaches with a blockchain sounds logical.

Yes transactions are digital, but they are neither open nor transparent. The information itself is heavily guarded, as it essentially ring fences the competitive advantage of banks and stops plucky start ups coming in, adding value and thereby reducing the perceived value/utility of a traditional bank.

Maybe they mean money no singular entity controls that still can enact sane monetary policy? There basically aren't any cryptocurrencies that are useful for writing long term (i.e. terms greater than 1 hour) contracts (here meaning do this action -> get this payout). The value fluctuates too much. Having a stable value is not necessary for transmitting value, or even as a store of value as long as the long term trend is not down. Determining how much someone should be paid in the future in it is awful though.