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My favorite future use case is electronic cash with privacy.

There are many LEGAL activities that people do not want to show up in a central database. For example, think of many things related to love and relationships.

"tantamount to waiting for a greater fool to buy out the current players" <= this is like investing works in general, or? ;-)

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There are also plenty of legal efforts (e.g. free political speech) that are actively being shut down by payment processors of all sorts; these need some means of sustainment and crypto has provided what is needed.

> many LEGAL activities that people do not want to show up in a central database

Unfortunately cryptocurrencies aren't just a central database they're a distributed database - all transactions are public. You can try using a tumbler service but since these are obviously money laundering havens they're not going to last long.

Monero, Zcash, Grin. Three designs that are based on different cryptography - all three giving user full privacy.

>all transactions are public

Not the case, see payment channels.

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