Why would I want to be further locked into Apple/Google’s ecosystem? Sure its convenient, and I also work for Big Tech, but my idealistic self tells me that value infrastructure should be owned by no single/oligopoly of central entities.

They also don’t provide a digital currency - its an abstraction/wrapping for the native countries currency. In my mind sufficiently decentralized (sybil resistant) currencies are the only true digital currencies.

Also as an aside given the top post on Stripe atm, I want to see decentralized identity take off - its a better use case for DLT imo. The networks security would come from the token value of an underlying crypto.

https://stripe.com/identity

Payment systems are not currencies.

While this is true, early Bitcoin adopters started to conflate the two. Broadly speaking, Bitcoin has seen three or four phases:

1) Cypherpunks with a strong counter-cultural note till 2013

2) BTC as a currency + payment system ("Cheaper and faster than Western Union!") till 2016 after 1) exhausted the addressable market which is small. Lightning network is the semi-centralized attempt at resuscitating this but I have my doubts.

3) "Digital gold", SoV from 2017 when 2) fell on its face

From 3) on, you can't really call it a currency anymore as it just doesn't work well. And if it is no longer a functioning currency (despite El Salvador calling it one), IDK what the point is, really.

Whats the point of trading and investing in non voting stocks? Personally, I have never been a crypto bull. But the thing is you don't have to get the point, and I don't either. There seems to be a large appetite for risk. Add in to the fact that the risk is outside of (for what we/I know) the control of any one individual entity and it becomes pretty attractive.

That’s why the coins I have more faith in are coins which incentivize things like distributed compute/storage. However, currency in google play or whatever is missing features that “cash” provides. Sometimes I don’t want credit card companies/payment gateways/stores selling my purchase data to the highest bidder and would prefer anonymity.

Problem is how do you solve the need to eventually provide a real name and address for products to be shipped. Even if payment providers can be blind to what you are buying, the store/courier company still needs it.

Inversion of control. An idea that could be quite easily implemented by national postal services who already have a database of all addresses.

Instead of an address, you basically use a "PO Box number", which is an opaque handle. When you post it, it goes into the Royal Mail/USPS or whoever and they translate the PO Box into an address and deliver it to you.

Someone still has your address but the post office already have it so it's not much worse.

Mostly I mean: walk into a store, grab a few things off the shelf, and pay with bitcoins—the way cash is used.

If I use any current digital forms of payment, someone is watching/recording the transactions and pairing them with my ID for some ad campaign.

Oh and: I should be able to stroll up to a traffic light and be able to donate some BTC to a homeless person via Bluetooth without getting out of my car (so I don’t give them COVID)

Be your own bank and enter the centralized payment systems whenever you want.

Tbh I think the environmental impact of a true PoW blockchain used around the world isn't really worth it for the collective human species. But for each individual person who owns a good amount of btc, it's worth it.

Do you have any idea of the true environmental impact of your day-to-day economic choices? Whether or not an economic activity is “worth it” for the human species is an unanswerable question.

Of course it's subjective, but answerable. If everyone on earth had a monster truck that they drove around for 10 hours a day for fun... that would probably be considered wasteful by anybody reasonable.