At least it's better than Bitcoin, since in this case it's well known who the whales are.

If one wishes to subject their wealth to the whims of a massively centralized cartel of "rationally self interested" HOLDers, maybe it's better to deal with the devil(s) one knows.

Or better yet, don't use cryptocurrency at all. Then you can avoid all ethical dilemmas surrounding them.

Problem solved.

But then, you haven't solved the private electronic payment...

Most people don't want private electronic payments. In stable countries like the UK - where this is being launched - it's basically only useful for buying drugs and tax evasion.

One can argue than most people don't care about private messaging as well... I find it a bit scary that my bank has all my purchasing data : they basically know everything about me that way, what if they decide to sell this data ?

Use cash for every day payments - your bank will know nothing.

That's definitely not the direction taken by society... Pandemic, convenience, online businessew ( yeah, I know we could physically mail cash for online purchases but, come on... )

I can't remember the last time I could use paper cash. Beyond your daily groceries, everything is usually exclusively paid for digitally.

Surveillance on daily spends is not valuable. What's valuable is things connected to your identity, specifically associations with other individuals and companies.

This is the way government wants you to think. They want to know literally every dollar (unit_of_monetary_exchange) that you use and don't care one iota about your privacy. They don't want you to value privacy at all.

Here's the reality of the situation.

The vast majority of people simply don't care about this. I mean I have a hard enough of a time to get people to care about privacy-centered messaging apps. Getting them to even begin to comprehend the myriad of cryptocurrencies and the confusing space of DeFi is simply not going to catch on. To them, there's really no benefit outside of "number go up" and so-called store of values, which conveniently have the nasty side effect of requiring users to do their own OpSec. That's actually harder than you think.

And that's not even accounting for how scam-ridden the entire space is to begin with. Who can they even begin to trust? Seems like an oxymoron for a trustless system, when the fact is they aren't even sure if they can trust themselves.

I find it mildly hilarious too, that places like BNY Mellon and JP Morgan are exploring cryptocurrency storage options. Now we are back to "trusting" those darn evil banks everyone gets triggered about.

See how weird this rabbit hole gets?

You say that like those are bad things.