[EthanHeilman]

>Anonymity of payments? Bitcoin is a shitty way to pay for anything and I want convenience first and most of the time I do not care about anonymity at all.

Unfortunately Bitcoin provides much less anonymity than cash or credit card payments. Bitcoin provides excellent censorship resistance, in that Bitcoin lets anyone who has Bitcoin send Bitcoin to anyone that wants Bitcoin (assuming of course internet access and fairly technical users). Additionally Bitcoin lets people custody Bitcoins like cash or gold and also lets those same users send Bitcoins digitally. This is a new development and something people couldn't do before. We are still in the early stages of seeing how people use this new capability. Check back in 20-100 years.

Smart contracts, especially legally enforceable smart contracts, have existed well before cryptocurrencies, however cryptocurrencies provide a fairly natural setting for them.

>Did not happen, because finance is still largely a business of relationships and trust.

Relationships and trust mean a high cost of doing business, both because trust is expensive and because relationships are not able to be automated. Cryptocurrencies and smart contracts offer a technical substitute for trust. This substitute is not good in all cases and has some serious tradeoffs. However there are some areas in which it is a clear improvement.

[jjeaff]

I agree that cash is better for anonymous transactions ... Sometimes. But I don't follow that credit cards are more anonymous that Bitcoin.

You generally have to give up your ssn and lots of private data to get a credit card. Your name is tied to it.

Cash is great, but does require you or someone to physically deliver it.

But crypto can be laundered through a mixing service over a tor connection and when done properly and carefully, would be essentially untraceable.

[EthanHeilman]

>But I don't follow that credit cards are more anonymous that Bitcoin.

Credit card transactions are private between you, the merchant, the processor and your bank and anyone those parties sell your data to. Whereas Bitcoin transactions are recorded on a public immutable ledger.

>But crypto can be laundered through a mixing service over a tor connection and when done properly and carefully, would be essentially untraceable.

You can certainly obfuscate Bitcoin transactions. I even wrote a tumbling protocol for Bitcoin[0] and have been involved with other cryptocurrency privacy projects. I believe that cryptocurrencies can achieve a high degree of privacy, but we aren't there yet.

Note you can do similar things to make credit card payments more privacy. For instance by buying and trading gift cards or store credits.

At the end of the day if you buy physical goods online you have to have them delivered to your house, drop site or PO box. That means giving out a physical address which greatly reduces your anonymity.

[0]: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/575.pdf