There is another hidden cost: total mass government surveillance of the entire economy, including the ability to arbitrarily veto any transaction or participant for any reason (such as publishing) without trial or even burden of proof.

https://www.wired.com/2010/12/realtime/

People are only okay with this because it hasn’t been visibly abused on a large scale yet.

Imagine Nazi Germany having this sort of access to the private transactions of everyone in an entire country.

The abuses won’t ever be front-page news, either, because they’ll only ever be targeted against tiny fractions of society, and most people won’t be directly affected by their lives being surveilled and their rights being so infringed.

https://wikileaks.org/Banking-Blockade.html

Generally and commonly used payment systems (ie cash) that cannot be centrally censored are the only way to avoid this. Presently that means physical cash, physical precious metals, and cryptocurrency.

The first two are impractical for large-scale use.

> Generally and commonly used payment systems (ie cash) that cannot be centrally censored are the only way to avoid this. Presently that means physical cash, physical precious metals, and cryptocurrency. The first two are impractical for large-scale use.

Tether freezes accounts. Bitcoin gets confiscated. Eth forked when big stakeholders didn't like how the DAO went. And it's a bit hard to take seriously privacy concerns that propose a public transaction ledger as a solution.

(And of the three, only physical cash has actually been proven in large-scale use.)