Many laughable things become fine with technology. Look at various encryption or network protocols. If someone had seriously proposed to Caesar that to keep their messages truly safe they needed to work out the math of a one time pad for every communication (or maybe more practically by modern standards, AES), they'd be executed. Rather than dismiss things on analogy, look at things as they actually are. The total amount of friction for the bitcoin equivalent is very little which makes it not a problem at all.