Ideally, no transfer fees I suppose and universal access for every citizen which was supposed to be one of the distinguishing points compared to say credit cards.

It would have the potential to cut a lot of the middlemen out. I always found it curious that with cash we basically take it for granted that there's a ubiquitous, legally guaranteed payment infrastructure but with digital currencies it's more like a splintered set of services that take a quite considerable cut.

Also a very practical, relevant case. In a situation like this corona crisis, there'd be a trivial way to send everyone their 1200 bucks.

A lot of that is more a failing of the US financial system than financial systems in general, of course.

In my country (Australia), our Government could deposit money into the bank account that paid their last tax return with in less than a day... We have no transfer fees and real-time transfers (you can link a phone number to your account too). For international, things like TransferWise are pretty compelling and have crazy low fees...

There are people who don't have and cannot open bank accounts, especially in third-world countries. Cryptocurrencies (I'm talking about Bitcoin and friends) give them a way to receive money from anywhere in the world and store it safely.

A digital currency needs an infrastructure to run on, so there will be always fees of some sort. Credit cards have fees, Bitcoin has fees.

Those middlemen run the federal reserve. Good luck trying to remove banks from power without migrating to a different currency altogether.

What do you mean digital? Every number in yhe digital realm is currently backed by an asset or a reserve currency like the USD.

Sure, transactions are digital, but the underlying nature is still physical.

There are dollars that only exist as digital entries in the Fed's books and don't correspond to any physical printed bills. There is no fundamental "physical" backing for USD anymore.

USD is already a digital currency.

It’s certainly not. The money multiplier is a very basic macroeconomic concept. Almost very little of all the “money” is actually grounded in a tangible form. For all intents and purposes, almost all money is indeed digital.

It’s not digital as a cryptocurrency, but more as rows in database tables.

As a simple example, if everyone wanted to withdraw their money, all at once, very few people would actually be able to.