Now that I've recognized this pattern I see it everywhere: someone invents part of a solution, probably including some cool technology, then hails that as the solution and insists everyone else is wrong for not getting it.
The classic one is some FOSS people inventing a protocol where servers can talk to clients, and declaring a problem solved, when in actual fact, most people don't have a server. Mastodon is this, but so is XMPP.
HTTP took off because there were servers you could fetch things from with HTTP, not because it theoretically allowed you to fetch things from servers.
Paper euros aren't cool because I can "have money". They're cool because I can go to the grocery store and trade them for something to eat. My bank card isn't cool because I can "have money". It's cool because I can go and swipe it and not have to count paper euros. If you want cryptocurrency to be cool, you're going to have to get it integrated into grocery stores, which is, of course, impossible because it can only process 7 transactions per second. You also need a way to convert my paychecks into cryptocurrency, but this is basically solved with crypto exchanges now.
> the conversation is supposed to be about cryptocurrency technology,
> but you're talking about the gross financial companies that operate in cryptocurrency as if they ARE cryptocurrency.
That's because the middlemen are inevitable and they work the way they do for a reason—governments won't let them work any other way.
Cryptocurrency is a technological solution for a human problem, and you can't analyze the impact of the technology divorced from the human reality without losing so much resolution as to make your analysis meaningless.
If we want to use technology in real world to solve real world issues, we need to consider all important non-technical things.
Nuclear Energy is great, but governments and international organizations want to control it because it is too dangerous. So, if we need to use Nuclear Energy, we must play by such rules.
Money is the same thing. Each government wants to control them, regardless of their form.
If someone wants cryptocurrencies to be widely adopted, there is no option but to give them to businesses and governments.
So, crypto would be regulated like usual money. Major blockchains have records for all transactions, which can be tracked and used by businesses and governments to implement more strict control over the whole world. Therefore, the more people use crypto, the less privacy they have.
The Internet and Web were designed to be anonymous, but cookies, IP addresses, data collection, ML/AI, IMEI, MAC, and the control of registration in ISPs and mobile operators have led us to a situation where the government and companies can easily track people. The same situation would be with crypto, which was designed to be anonymous but used in another way.
the conversation is supposed to be about cryptocurrency technology,
but you're talking about the gross financial companies that operate in cryptocurrency as if they ARE cryptocurrency.
Not just one feature of its existence.
Common conflation.