They are a counter-force against the trend toward eliminating cash, and with it, financial privacy [1]:
>Any future cashless bank-payments society will be the outcome of a deliberate war on cash waged by an alliance of three elite groups with deep interests in seeing it emerge.
These statements from an executive at MasterCard are a great window into the company's designs on cash and its electronic corollaries:
>There's huge interest in cryptocurrencies and what perhaps they can create in the market place. Now we at MasterCard are not completely comfortable with the idea of cryptocurrencies largely because they go against the whole principle that we've established our business on which is really moving to a world beyond cash and ensuring greater transparency.. If you think about it, cash is a problem for a number of countries. Cash really facilitates anonymity, it facilitates illegal activity, it facilitates tax avoidance and a range of other things that aren't going to drive efficiency in an economy
-https://youtu.be/bO4jHXjCXw8?t=2m57s
>If it's an anonymous transaction, that sounds like a suspicious transaction. Why does somebody need to be anonymous?
-http://youtu.be/bO4jHXjCXw8#t=4m12s
[1] https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is...
The main function of banks is issuing debt, not holding cash.
I can buy $1 worth of Bitcoin, declare it ErikCoin, acceptable only in my stores at a 1/1,000,000 denomination, and I instantly "minted" $1,000,000 in cryptocurrency, using only the Bitcoin blockchain.
Bitcoin doesn't let people be banks, it let's people be the mint.
- You can't destroy anyone's balance after you've issued them currency
- Balances are publicly verifiable
- Balances can be stored in one's mind
... lots of things. Tons of affordances differ from a game currency.
You're not thinking big enough. All I need to be a bank is some money to lend, or safe to put deposits in.
Cryptocurrencies let people be their own nation state.