now you have to have a cell phone number, registered with the state, and pay ongoing maintenance for the number’s service in order to take part in commerce. Imagine a world where nobody had to get anyone’s permission to send or receive payments, or pay ongoing fees for a service number, or register that number with the state. Now do you see where cryptocurrency folks are coming from?

1. No, the state doesn’t have to register my phone number. And in countries where this is the case, that’s not a question of technology.

2. In poor countries where monthly phone bills or lack of banking is an issue they often have prepaid.

3. Almost every adult in the world has a phone, you don’t even need a smartphone for some of these payment systems.

4. If you’re a poor Kenyan farmer that has been using your phone to pay anonymously for over a decade, I highly doubt you care that you need “permission” from Safaricom to do it.

So no, I really really don’t see the point. And I am someone that raised (a tiny amount of) seed money for a crypto based money transfer system for Africa in 2012. There could be improvements on the margins but there’s really no disruptive advantage to it being “decentralised”.

I would like to not own a phone, nor a phone number in the future. The way it’s going, the smarter folks will.. not be using consumer tech.

Registering phone numbers with the state is the global standard for a majority of humans, so don’t give me that “I don’t have to register”. Try that in China, Brazil, India, etc. With permissionless systems, as long as I have an internet connection, I can send and receive money.

If you don’t see this value, I’m sorry.

You are arguing for a state run centralized closed system of monetary control, and I am arguing for a non-state open monetary system in which anyone can participate. Do you understand how vastly different these two things are?

While you wrote this, around 1000 people got their first smartphone. We're getting close to 4 billion smartphones in the world, the trend is pretty clear. You are an incredibly rare exception.

I'm not "arguing" for anything, I'm just stating the fact that you can already transfer money peer to peer, and it isn't controlled by "the state" just because in some countries your phone number has to be registered. Or are you saying they also register each transfer?

How would your "permissionless" money transfer system work, do you have any ideas or is it just slogans?

And if you don't want to use a phone, you would presumably need a computer. That seems less inclusive, not more.

State of the art using bitcoin today is Strike, which performs payments over the lightning network. It’s largely behind the adoption of bitcoin in El Salvador.

I know I’m rare in my beliefs and paranoid understanding of geopolitics. Phones and cellular networks are not technologies to liberate the soul, no, far from it.

You'd still need a computer or phone, and a bank account, unless you imagine getting paid in bitcoins. But then the government will definitely start tracking that, or outlaw it if they can't. They are not going to give up their ability to tax the economy.

Yup, just bitcoin. Strike also uses stablecoins so you can send/receive USD without a bank being involved at all. True, peer-to-peer value transfers, nothing like a sms->sms transfer through a 3rd party. This will be my last comment — I beg you to wake up, look around and see what is happening. Janky cell phone centralized payment systems run by banks, telcos and governments suck. They represent control and surveillance. You think these central payment networks are about empowering a Kenyan farmer, no, it is about controlling them, being able to apply financial censorship and have full visibility into their private spending. There is a better world being developed right now. One that needs no gates nor gatekeepers.