[dragonwriter]

> It is hard for me to believe that people will continue to be fooled into thinking that the way to do cryptocurrency transactions is to not do cryptocurrency transactions and instead give their cryptocurrency to a middleman who will continue charging middleman fees.

The whole mining network are middlemen who charge middleman fees, so you’re pretty much stuck with that, short of deciding to be a miner.

And the more currencies are in common use that aren’t locked in essentially exclusive jurisdictional domains, the more demand merchants and consumers will have for middlemen that make dealing with multiple of them and converting them at need as close to frictionless as possible. Sure, partisans of one crypto or another will be happy to transact directly in that crypto without an abstraction layer over multiple currencies, but they will be the exception, not the norm.

Crypto idealists may each see their favored coin as the way to get beyond traditional middlemen, but in reality each coin that reaches nontrivial use actually increases the demand for middlemen.

[ilaksh]

Right. So anyone who thinks that there should be public distributed protocols for exchanging money is a hopeless idealist and just making things worse.

So I guess in your opinion it would be better if digital transactions just continued to go through monopoly private middlemen.

[dragonwriter]

> So anyone who thinks that there should be public distributed protocols for exchanging money is a hopeless idealist and just making things worse.

No, anyone who thinks people should exclusively directly make use of “public distributed protocols” is a hopeless idealist.

They aren't “making things worse”, though, except from the perspective of their own hopeless ideal.

> So I guess in your opinion it would be better if digital transactions just continued to go through monopoly private middlemen.

It can't be both “middlemen” and “monopoly”; it's at worst an oligopoly. And, no, I didn't say that. But more competing low-level payment networks makes middlemen that can abstract them more valuable to most consumers and merchants.