[tphyahoo2]

Anyone can issue (paper) cash.

Cash is just a paper IOU for some other thing. With 100 dollar bill, that thing is 100 USD. You could also issue paper for gold backed IOU, or gold itself, or bitcoin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking

Counterfeiting paper is a problem, so you need force against this, and this is why the government is generally involved. But what kind of paper counterfeiting is enforced against, is just a legality. Currently the wost thing to counterfeit is 100 dollar bills. Law could be changed to make it equally bad to counterfeit gold bills, or bitcoin bills.

Saying bitcoin is less private than cash is a category error.

[redox99]

It would be extremely hard to issue cash as non government assuming the government doesn't want cash to exist, it would basically require a centralized entity that could be trivially shut down by the government.

[tphyahoo2]

I agree, and this is a reason I am glad bitcoin exists.

My point is that there is nothing stopping bitcoin from being used in a paper cash like way, any more than any other value carrying token.

Bitcoin without government support? Possible, but inconvenient and dangerous. Bitcoin with government support? More nice things.

Currently we are in the "with government support" world, more or less. I hope this continues.

[redox99]

I'm more of an Ethereum/PoS guy but what is for sure a fact, now that we're talking of decentralized issuance, is that you need PoW, at least for bootstrapping a cryptocurrency that has an even remotely fair distribution of tokens (instead of almost all being in the hands of the people that were there from the beginning).

Even then, almost all PoW are tuned in a way to pump the value and enrich the early people, not fairly distribute tokens or make the crypto functional as a currency.