[acdha]

> ability to trade instantly with anyone anywhere with no fees

Neither of those statements has ever been true and in recent years they've been ludicrously untrue — affluent people in developed countries were complaining about the transaction costs and they're supposed to be transformative for people in a developing country?

[cachvico]

Ethereum and Litecoin among others offer fast and cheap transactions today, and efforts are underway to solve this problem for Bitcoin (e.g. Lightning Network).

There will likely be a trade-off or balance of trust against transaction speed and cost. We're still working out how to build it and so we're not there yet, but my belief holds; the banana governments are not going to disappear anytime soon.

[acdha]

Fast and cheap are still not synonyms for instant and free but that’s at least possibly closer to one day being competitive with the existing mobile systems.

Those existing systems are also useful for evaluating the claims that this avoids bad governments, which is to say that it’s limited to bypassing antiquated banks. A networked system can’t avoid a sovereign state unless that state is completely inept, at which point everyone will be using a neighboring currency or USD anyway.