I am a crypto skeptic but some of the pegged cryptos have come close to solving that use case.* A lot of money changers in Argentina will accept USDT which you can send from anywhere in the world. Of course you can’t get rich off speculatively trading a pegged currency so it largely goes unnoticed. Obvious caveats: sketchy backing of these currencies, legality of all that, but it is already being used for that purpose. A US government backed coin could effectively kill credit cards and money orders but they no doubt also want some form of KYC to make sure you aren’t funding ISIS or whatever. Of course that is anathema to crypto bros who hold decentralization above all else.

Sure, at least one major benefit of KYC (which is also completely broken with crypto) is the "Undo button". Plenty of times you need to phone a bank and they will sometimes, begrudgingly, press the Undo button. What's Mr. Nakamoto's number if something goes wrong in a crypto transaction?

To give credit where it’s due, crypto spurred the Fed to launch FedNOW.

Just by the look of it [1] and the menacing hero question "Is your organization ready?" I fear something similar to the IRS tax filing [2] will happen: instead of having an open API usable by any easily-authenticable entity, only a few backroom deals will grant access to it.

[1] https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow

[2] https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/choosing-a-tax-profess...

> instead of having an open API usable by any easily-authenticable entity

It’s intentionally mediated through banks. We don’t want to create a money-laundering system—that is an explicit lesson learned from crypto. (We also want a layer that can absorb fraud. Another lesson from crypto.) But there are banks who will API it for KYC’d clients.