I mean, it can. Not minutes, and minutes means internet speeds. Old school finance is in the order of days. Securities can collapse in minutes too I guess… Fiat currencies inflate and are worth less every year. In some places in the world, relative to the USD, which itself is an inflationary fiat currency, it could be 50%! What if you gave your life’s labor and saved it all in something a politician and banker could erase with a database record.
Yes. It can. And has. Currencies collapse all the time. We have many examples throughout history where extreme events led to values in day to day currencies fluctuate wildly. I get it. You need the dollar to pay your debts, your goods and services and your tax. This is the same as every human ever in history in their respective daily transactional token. (US) Dollars are good, and will be how people pay for things around the world in some form or another for many many years to come. However, we must not forget that it is a fiat currency, and as such value is at the whim of the politician and banker.
Regarding the wild scary world of decentralized stores or value, cryptocurrency tokens, Bitcoin. Ethereum. It is scary to see your savings fluctuate wildly. It does however grant some perspective on the system. Money is the shared delusion that some token is worth some goods or services to other humans, or systems. The systems part is where it gets interesting, down the rabbit hole. Sometimes we want to trust the math, rather than trust the man or trust the gun. The smartest people on earth seem pretty ok with the math; but they don’t always have the confidence of the man or the gun. It is a fairly new concept to apply planetary value structures to decentralized peer to peer networks.
What if, in the future, we implemented protocols that enabled the same meta patterns we see emerge in existing systems, like the global equity and capital markets, commodities and financial instruments and implemented them on permission-less systems, with no gatekeepers, no old guard to enforce arbitrary discriminatory and rules, only math. Would that not empower humanity? Could it not break down existing long lived biases and systems of oppression? Freedom through mathematics.