Also, you're just wrong about traditional financial intermediaries. It's easy enough to provide a few different ways to transfer funds. Or to do it over a relatively open network like e-check or wire transfer, where there's no lock-in possible.
I don't know, but tying the expansion of the email system to the reach of the US financial system seems quite limiting and archaic, and totally contrary to the international and open nature of the internet.
>>Or to do it over a relatively open network like e-check or wire transfer, where there's no lock-in possible.
Making a wire transfer to use email? That'd be ridiculously expensive. You'd need a payment system built on top of the bank wire system, and it would need to be truly international in scope, and open, which no trusted third party based financial system is.
Email is already open and international and doesn't need bank accounts. This is paid for email solicitation, and nobody needs to do that without access to payment networks, unless perhaps they wish to conceal their true identity because they're spear-phishing.
>>and nobody needs to do that without access to payment networks
Some people can't access a particular financial system, due to political reasons. The global financial system is not borderless.
The important word here being "seems". Seeming is a thing that happens in someone's head. So the fuller version is "seems to an anonymous person who has tied their identity to a particular technology and a specific political vision".
It does not seem like that to me. Or to 99.9% of companies, who start out tying their companies to the reach of a specific national or regional financial system and then move happily beyond it.
In practice, starting with the use of the US financial system provides much more reach than Bitcoin, which has a much smaller user-base, something more like Bolivia or Switzerland, and whose "residents" do much less of their economic activity through that financial system than those in developed nations do.
Of course but that's pretty disingenuous, because it ignores the obvious: that those pushing this track see cryptocurrency becoming mass adopted over the coming years.
Their point is that cryptocurrency's potential reach is far greater than any centralized legacy financial system's.
Their other point is that it's more consistent with the open and decentralized nature of the internet.
>>So the fuller version is "seems to an anonymous person who has tied their identity to a particular technology and a specific political vision".
Are you sure that's not you?