| > people do not want to be engaged in the process of running a bank or a government But casual users can choose to store their crypto assets with a bank/custodian/exchange. Granted, it defeats some of the benefits, but not all. E.g. most crypto has low inflation compared to USD. Even though CPI inflation is ~2%, the money supply inflates around ~10% per year, whereas most crypto will inflate <1% long term. > the utility of the network is trivial to compromise or destroy for a state level actor For smaller PoW currencies, absolutely -- a state level actor could acquire majority hash power, then build their own fork which contained no transactions. For Bitcoin, it'd take time and lots of money, but it's possible. But PoS currencies are more resilient. With something like Cardano, I don't see what governments could do, apart from banning its use within their own jurisdiction. Even if they purchased a 51% stake, once they start the malicious fork, the community would know which accounts were participating and could organize a hard fork to ban them. > most crypto is actually regressive from a privacy/personal liberty standpoint when compared with cash, or even the current banking system in many ways That's a fair criticism of Bitcoin etc., but future iterations of cryptocurrencies will surely include ZeroCash-style privacy at least as an optional feature, if not for every transaction. > The classic "remittances" use case makes no sense because you still have to change the crypto for real currency, which is where the cost is, (yes, only until the currency is meaningfully bootstrapped, let me know when that happens). Here's how bootstrapping could happen: - {Apple,Google,Samsung}Pay add support for various cryptocurrencies. Initially, most stores may not support crypto payments, either because the POS (often Verifone) doesn't support it, or because the merchant doesn't want to deal with it. - POS vendors start supporting crypto, starting with more agile companies like Square. For them, there's no downside apart from development costs. Online processors like Stripe and PayPal add support as well. - As processor support improves, gradually more and more merchants accept crypto payments, either for PR reasons, or for the low fees, quick settlement, lack of chargebacks, etc. Some offer discounts for crypto payments. - Payroll providers and and tax services eventually add support crypto payments. Again, no downside besides development costs. So people who want to can do everything in their favorite cryptocurrency, even though it's converted to and from fiat in the background. - After several generations, taxes are the one thing people still (indirectly) use fiat for. The government still makes money from inflation tax, but eventually they realize that it's essentially a wealth tax, with tons of fees going to exchanges. They replace it with an explicit wealth tax, or (optimistically) something that makes more economic sense, like land value tax. I'm not saying it's a sure thing at all, but it seems somewhat plausible, no? |
Money supply is not the same thing as inflation! Inflation is an aggregate measure of the level of prices and wages, and since almost all crypto transactions are pegged to fixed underlying USD values while the crypto price level floats, it's not at all possible to say that the purchasing power of crypto varies.
You've been lead astray by the virtual goldbugs.
(Also, Apple etc are not going to get on board with a system that doesn't support refunds by design, and the most likely attack on PoW is declaring that it's the biggest environmental threat since tetraethyl lead or CFCs and putting a global ban on participating in it)