I think that’s the argument, why move to a whole new currency if it’s more of the same problems with fewer safeguards for the non technical and no way to get lost items back?
> Why would the poor have wanted to switch to the Internet?
Look at the history and this is easily answered: it let them do things better/easier/cheaper. That could be shopping, accessing government services, dealing with companies, finding a job, seeking educational material, entertainment, dating, connecting with friends and family (email was a pretty sweet alternative to long distance phone calls), etc. The internet picked up sharply as computers came down in price and people tried even cheaper options like WebTV because there was so much demand, and that started happening very quickly.
In contrast, cryptocurrency had much lower barriers to entry but despite having at least twice as many years by that point it has very little non-speculative usage because it doesn’t do anything most people care about. Even being a cheaper PayPal/Venmo would be an improvement.
"really early days" is an argument that a lot more work is needed, not that everyone should go all in knowing there is going to be a lot of collateral damage along the way even _if_ it works out.
You can pay your taxes, fines, and court ordered debts with fiat currency. It's arguably THE MOST stable thing in a functioning society above pure barter.
Try saving for retirement. At 2% inflation (the target rate), after 20 years you'd lose 1 - (.98 ^ 20) = 33.2% of the purchasing power of your savings.
But right now, inflation is 7.5% year-over-year. And that's the official measure, which uses "owners' equivalent rent" based on a survey, instead of actual rent prices.
In the past 20 years (Jan 2002 - Jan 2022), the CPI went from 177.7 to 281.933, or a 58.6% increase. This means a 2.3% average inflation rate.
> Try saving for retirement. At 2% inflation (the target rate), after 20 years you'd lose 1 - (.98 ^ 20) = 33.2% of the purchasing power of your savings.
People shouldn't be holding dollars for retirement. People should be investing in productive assets. Its not good to have society's wealth locked up in paper notes or shiny metals hidden under a mattress or buried in the backyard.
This implies that your retirement savings are in cash, which is inaccurate for most folks. And certainly, I'd rather have it invested in the stock market than the wild fluctuations of the crypto market, especially with its uncertain withdrawal ability and complete inability to recover if someone steals it (which is, again, typically much easier with crypto than a brokerage).
Yes, existing financial systems are terrible. They are rampant with abuse, manipulation, and people converting human behavior into abstract objects that they can gamble on so that they can extract wealth without providing value and they do this to the point that they introduce systemic risk to our entire society.
Cryptocurrency is this times 1000. It is the financialization of everything. Instead of mortgages being packaged up into bonds and then derivatives of those bonds, everything gets packaged up into financial instruments and then derivatives of those instruments. Something like ETH makes it very easy to write programs that move tokens that are worth dollars based on inputs taken from the ledger itself. That inevitably encourages a sort of hyper-financial system.