Exactly. All the talk about fees misses the point because accepting and securing paper money is also very costly.
And the provocateur's stunt in the article also misses the point, because electronic payments for groceries aren't a dystopian tyranny no matter how loud he screams about it.
And the crypto skeptics are missing the point when they say you can't buy a coffee with bitcoin, because buying coffee is a solved problem, tap to pay with a bank card works just fine.
And the crypto advocates are missing the point when they say that lightning or solana or something else will solve the coffee-buying conundrum because that's not a problem that needs solving.
The real point about cash payments and crypto is whether people should be able to make large person-to-person payments that are not trivially surveilled or controlled.
In a free society, should people have this capability? Or are the dangers of illegal transactions so great that this freedom must be eliminated?
Europe has mostly free and mostly instant SEPA transfers which are one answer. Large payments are easy and cheap, though they are not secret or untraceable. Perhaps that's a reasonable trade-off.
The US payments system is a mess by comparison, where we have no privacy paired with extreme inconvenience. Try to buy a $20,000 car from a private party on a holiday weekend to see how well that works.
I’m not convinced that spur-of-the-moment, trustless private-party $20,000 transactions are a significant problem.
Every system has edge cases.
The FCBA coverage, on the other hand, has some real value. That said, even though I have used it a few times, I doubt it has saved me as much as I've spent in CC fees.
Furthermore you get a lot more than just writing a few bits with a credit card transaction. You can bypass the cc companies and cash logistics costs by taking checks. But certainly the revealed preference is to not do that.