Most big tech companies got out of or significantly scaled back their blockchain business, it is solution chasing a problem. The web3 people apparently haven’t caught on yet
I think secretly they are aiming for the digital currency aspect of blockchain, e.g. Bitcoin but couldn't understand how it works as MBA schools havn't mint out bitcoin graduates yet. Maybe in abother 10 years.
The problem is infinitely printable FIAT, controlled by corrupt and incompetent politicians that is very slow and very expensive to to transact overseas and mutable.
The solution is 100x faster, cheaper, more secure, immutable, less prone to fraud and limited in supply.
Those are problems in theory, but I don’t think most people are concerned or affected by them. I’m certainly not.
I never need to transfer money quickly between accounts — it’s never once been a problem to wait a couple days. And sure there are real economic problems with printing money, but again, the government does a decent enough job at keeping the dollar stable that it doesn’t affect me.
And there’s the fact that the US gov has tons of power to maintain the validity of the fiat dollar through legislation, and as a backup they have the use of force through police and jail (in the case of tax evasion, or avoiding the laws). Then there are international alliances, and there’s the largest military in the world also with a strong interest in maintaining the dollar’s value.
So I’m not worried about the value of the US dollar in the long term — at least I certainly trust it more than a purely technical solution with none of the US Gov benefits.
Faster: I don’t have any problem with speed of USD transactions. In fact, most transactions are faster than crypto via credit cards or cash.
Cheaper: there are $0 transaction fees for cash, and low fees for credit.
Secure: US laws do a decent enough job
Fraud: crypto exchanges get hacked and there is often no recourse — if my credit card is stolen, there are laws that protect me
Limited supply: by definition, that makes the currency deflationary, which is horrible for a growing economy. And it’s obvious in bitcoin. Nobody spends money today if it’ll be worth more tomorrow — that’s why everyone just buys and holds bitcoin as an investment, not uses it as a currency
You’re saying that you trust the government a lot in making sure the dollar value stays stale, however, it has lost 30% or more since the start of the pandemic if you look at price increases of commodities, so you are already very wrong.
It might not matter to you that sending cross border transactions have very high fees, because you live in a first world country and are rich, but 99% of the world aren’t as rich as you.