Sadly scammers follow both new and old tech and it takes a while for measure to catch up. That's not necessarily a fault of the tech itself.
I have seen no proof that it solves anything the proponents have been touting for 5+ years now - just examples of increases in negative externalities.
Using money online has an obvious utility.
"There are financial primitives that cannot exist in traditional finance that I'd call pretty novel. For example flash loans allow uncollateralized loans for millions of dollars[0]. Or take KeeperDAO[1] or Dai[2] or any of the other meta protocols generating returns by providing utility. Also the sheer fact that this is all decentralized/identity-less is already a novel aspect.
[0] https://aave.com/flash-loans/
[1] https://medium.com/keeperdao/a-keepers-guide-to-arbitrage-mi...
That's a bad thing, not a good one.
that sounds like a massive negative externality to me, not something positive
Donations to people where paypal doesn’t work are also easier.
Those are the only uses cases (for me) I encountered and used though ;)
Therefore, you already have to trust them, in which case you might as well just wire the money the old-fashioned way.
Tor is the only network sufficient enough to thwart malicious state actor's efforts.
It comes closest at least. I’m not sure if it’s more than rumors, but they are persistent that NSA and similar actors can de-anonymyze tor users.
Luckily state actors do not play into any of my threat models.
[0] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2020/06/12/facebook-paid-fo...
When countries descend into chaos or go full on authoritarian the best option is often to leave, but there might already be capital controls. So what can you take with you? Stocks: good luck if held by a broker in the country. Physical gold or cash: good luck at the border/customs. Foreign accounts: hard to come by for most people even in the first world due to regulations. Any serious amount of money is very hard to move between jurisdictions, especially in times of crisis, through traditional means.
If you believe your host country doesn't own you and you should be able to relocate to wherever you are treated best, Bitcoin can be a good tool if you were unprepared so far (e.g. because you didn't think a crisis could hit _your_ country). This might not be a use case for you today, especially if you are happy with your country and it is stable. But don't discount that the situation of others might differ.
The OP is proposing what is arguably an authoritarian prohibition on an entire class of software.