> 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.

It's just a different approach with different tradeoffs. Credit cards push the fraud risk and fees on the merchant. Crypto can push it to the user (and in the process reduce the fees incurred).

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).

The ability to reverse a charge isn't just about helping you if you are cheated by a merchant, though. It is also about if your credentials are compromised and used by someone else.

Sure, you might be happy to give up your ability to get a chargebacks against a particular merchant.... but what about against a thief?

It's a tradeoff - in a number of cases, I would be willing to accept that risk. I already do with cash.

Sure, but the more articles like this I read about crypto, the more it sounds like carrying cash at 3am in the worst part of town....

What about when someone creates a loan in your name or steals your tax refund or your real estate down payment?

You can remedy all of those things in the current system.

Mine doesnt. I can only block my card and sue. No chargebacks possible. For me any crypto is basically just as good, yet even more secure.

Or get a different credit card?

The banking system deals with it by just reversing the transaction so the end user of the system, the consumer, doesn't care. This ends up screwing the merchant most of the time, causing the price to be paid by higher prices, but people don't seem to care.

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.

> Why is this the acid test? Buying a coffee is a solved problem so why is blockchain tech expected to address this use case?

Wait. If everyday transactions are not the use-case, then (excluding speculation and money laundering), what exactly is it?

There's finance stuff which is mostly large organization to large organization. Everything from escrow, loans invoices, to things like RFPs and supply chain management.

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.

> neutral platforms

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.

> The big ones down the line are new methods of organizing and collaborating. DAOs allow for decentralized corporations and governments.

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?

Identity is a huge topic itself with lots of projects doing fundamental research and experiments but essentially if it's a traditional physical government then it would work like it does today where you would use your government secured ID to vote. Not much would change. If it's a digital government then it would probably be using an identity based on built up history of actions and financial settlements and connections to other highly verified accounts. Ethereum has a project called POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol) which is a way of identifying that a real person attended a specific event or performed some important action. These POAP badges can't be faked and are already being used for things like being able to vote on certain dev polls if you've attended a Devcon.

> If it's a digital government then it would probably be using an identity based on built up history of actions and financial settlements and connections to other highly verified accounts.

Not sure if I understand this correctly. You mean, an account will be considered "genuine", if it had a long enough history of activity?

Sort of like a credit score matched with landlords who vouch that you rented from them before. The longer that history the harder it is to fake and also the harder it is to just be the same person with multiple accounts. These systems usually have some component of a social graph where people will interact with and vouch for other people and having more and higher quality connections (more verified, connected to someone you know personally is real) gives you a higher legitimacy rating. It's usually up to the organization to set the minimum bar of how verified someone is to be considered unique.

Except you don't need a cryptocurrency to have decentralized applications or neutral platforms.

Blockchain addresses the fundamental societal concern of trust. It addresses accountability and transparency, removes middlemen, and maybe down the road will provide a currency use case. Yes, it can act as currency but that is the use case with the worst odds.

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.