There's a bajillion fintechs helping the banks sort out their UI issues and make it friendlier/better.
Bitcoin is still basically unusable for everyday transactions, and the endless stream of wallet provider hacks is not convincing anyone that it's secure. As TFA says, the hazards for normal folks playing in this pool are getting worse. If the miners are frontrunning your transaction every time you want to get paid, what's the point?
Virtually nobody wants to 'actually own' money or do whatever they want with it, they want to buy groceries, pay rent, or put it in their bank account.
If people wanted to actually own stuff they'd buy pinephones instead of samsung galaxies.
Why is this the acid test? Buying a coffee is a solved problem so why is blockchain tech expected to address this use case?
> the endless stream of wallet provider hacks is not convincing anyone that it's secure
Does the endless stream of point-of-sale and credit card hacks make you question the security of dollars, euros and yen?
No, because my credit card company gives me my money back when there is fraud.
Crypto promoters always paint the irreversibility of blockchains as a feature, but it always seems like a risk to me.
I would be happy to have a way to pay merchants I trust online with and remove the ability to reverse the charge if I was financially incentivized to do this (with the money the merchant saves on fees).
Sure, you might be happy to give up your ability to get a chargebacks against a particular merchant.... but what about against a thief?
And most people don't store value in currency long term, they typically store value in assets such as precious metals, securities, or real estate. Cash has a purpose of exchanging value in the modern economy, nothing more. It is manipulated by design to bring stability to the economy to allow for a more favorable business environment.
I think crypto has a place in the world... but it's not as a general purpose currency. Using anything but a fiat currency for commerce is way too unstable for long term sustainability.
Wait. If everyday transactions are not the use-case, then (excluding speculation and money laundering), what exactly is it?
Then there's the NFT/Unique items section which is for gaming (God's Unchained/Magic the Gathering where each card is owned digitally and can be traded freely with others or used as collateral for a loan), media (You own a movie but can use it on any service), and art (Tokenized art is a big craze right now).
The big ones down the line are new methods of organizing and collaborating. DAOs allow for decentralized corporations and governments. There's a lot of cool stuff here.
There's more but payments are really just a tiny use case of crypto. The big stuff like decentralized applications which might replace Google and Facebook with privacy preserving neutral platforms built for everyone to use.
Most internet platforms used to be "neutral" - or significantly more so than today. The current discussion in society is about the problems that too much neutrality can cause.
However your stance may be on those topics, this very same discussion will extend to decentralised communication networks as well, should they ever go mainstream.
Ok, dumb question: How would such a decentralised government keep itself from being overrun by, say, the Russia troll army, or any other actor with enough resources to take over a majority of it?
Not sure if I understand this correctly. You mean, an account will be considered "genuine", if it had a long enough history of activity?
When it comes to currency, your coffee is not the target right now. Getting rid of entrenched monopolistic behavior is the best first step: wire transfer fees, Western Union, transfers that take days to process, objectionable government-defined illegality, banks freezing your funds, etc.
Does the endless theft of money through central banks' intentionally inflating the money supply increase your faith that government fiat is secure? Hacks against centralized wallet providers don't count as security weaknesses in decentralized protocols such as bitcoin.
Perhaps the current danger with Ethereum-based DeFi is that its far too centralized, and typically (but not necessarily) contracts deployed on it are also far to centralized in their design, governance, and security reviews before deployment.
It's not some moral pillar that crypto is taking a stand against at all, it's just removing all the processes that protect both sides of transactions and distributing those trust mechanisms to those parties instead.
What you need is a payment system that can handle transactions where the seller is honest and the buyer is flaky when the existing one is built around the opposite assumption. And if the banks can't provide that (or the existing regulatory environment doesn't allow them to) then it's good when something else fills the gap.
Those examples you listed are at least an explainable, understandable flavor of stupid. "Hello, bank? I'm disputing this charge" or "Yes, I really bought that stuff".
It's no accident that TFA has Cthulhu in the header -- we're crossing into a malevolent and incomprehensible dimension of stupid. "Hello, void? Robot monsters ate my contract" and you hear nothing but echoes in your marrow.
Ok, so you have some grief with how the banking system works
> These are nonstarters that would get laughed out of the room if pitched today.
How is this related? No one is pitching building a KYC government regulated financial banking system?
You're just used to the stupidity, so it's easier to scrutinize the new things. But there are people out there who take those downsides seriously. And sure, you're always trading old problems for new, different problems, but it's nice to have the choice between those trade-offs for once.