Curious what fundamentals CCs bring to the table over traditional fiat, digital or physical. Because the downsides look brutal: difficult to understand, fragile, non-reversible (sometimes a pro but often a con), expensive to operate, volatile, incompatible with KYC (sometimes a pro but often a con), etc

The obvious answer is censorship resistance.

If you want an example, for why censorship resistance is useful, you can look back at 2011, when donations were stopped, to wikileaks, even though they were not charged with any crimes.

Crypto donations worked for them though. Bring up whatever thing that you want, about the problems, but at the end of the day, crypto donations worked for them, and visa didn't.

It is useful, to be able to make transactions to other people, in situations where banks, or credit card processors, attempt to block the transactions (even though no one has been charged with any crimes!)

The very clear and main thing it brings is getting rid of the middleman, at least for transactions, whether it be governments or businesses. This is a bigger deal than it sounds, as the middle man defines most policy around transactions, whether it be who can trade, when, and how, which creates huge imbalances in fairness and accessibility, and also can be enforced at nation state borders. These may be seen as cons by many, but to be frank, many find great value in these properties, and because it's a more efficient marketplace it will naturally take root.

There’s still a middle man - the blockchain. If you truly want no middlemen you can barter.

Well, it doesn't. It replaces a fuzzy set of middleman with another.

And there isn't enough attention to the Bitcoin governance to make it better than the government-based system. Cryptocoin people don't even want to discuss governance, because they like to believe there's nothing to govern and nobody governing.

That isn't really a fair representation. The amount of leeway to affect policy and transactions on a blockchain by whomever you think these middlemen are is negligible compared to things like stocks and bank accounts.

No middle man can stop you from sending BTC to someone in Asia. No middleman can force your transaction to take 5 days. No middleman can stop your transaction. No middleman can stop transactions at night and weekends. No middleman can trade afterhours while you are stuck waiting until the next day.

Hum... Yeah, the different middleman come with different problems, not the same ones.

We don't have much clarity on what those new problems are (we know very few of them), but what is perfectly clear is that every interested party is actively avoiding creating some mechanism for solving them.

I want a middle man in most of my transactions.

Just imagine if a gas station changed their prices to ounces instead of gallons and you filled up your gas tank for $3000 before you realized the scam. With no middle man that money is gone. With a credit card you can refuse the charge and tell the credit card company who will ban that seller from their network and not charge you.

Sure, you do for some things, as most people do. And many people find a lot of value in no middleman for other things. This is not contradictory.

The only transactions where a middle man are a problem for me is the government and taxes. I would like to be able to give someone money without reporting it to the IRS. I would like to be able to buy weed in the mail, but the government doesn't allow that. Crypto doesn't stop laws from existing.

People love to bring up Venezuela, but what happens when that government finds out someone has bought a house with crypto?

There are escrow services for blockchain transactions; the difference to digital fiat is that you are not forced to use a middleman.

Volatile is the only reasonably thing you said

I still don't see it: Money is trust in society remaining stable, condensed to (almost) physical form. That's how I can turn energy, resources and labour into money, because I can expect to turn it back into either of those things. If something happens to the value of the Euro and I'm not able to do that reliably anymore, it will be a symptom of a much larger dysfunction in my immediate surroundings than can be helped by holding some other currency, decentralized or not.

I also don't want it: Cryptocurrency is a new financial sector, and it will inevitably come with a new set of institutions, led by a new set of people. And instead of a group of fairly boring, fairly conservative central bankers whose main goal is preservation of the system underpinning current society, we will get some weird hodgepodge of libertarians extremists, run-of-the-mill grifters and Ponzi schemers, plus whatever set of state-sponsored actors whose ambitions are mostly geopolitical, rather than economic. And all even more beyond democratic institutional control than even the most detached 20th century investment banker would have dared dream of.

Nothing says "revolution" like your freewheeling capitalist invention getting co-opted by financial giants.