Stellar has since fixed this by enabling exchanges to require a memo.[2]
[1]https://www.lumenauts.com/guides/what-are-memos
[2]https://www.stellar.org/developers-blog/fixing-memo-less-pay...
Like other commenters have said, I think Stellar either accomplishes lots of the things you're hoping for or gives you the tools to build them and if you're genuinely interested in these problems I think it's worth another look.
If you send me your Keybase address or a coinbase deposit address and memo I'll send you $50 worth of XLM at current prices. In return, please try using Stellar and learning more about it.
I'm not sure how Stellar will help me, unless my local bar has started taking XLM. I suppose I can ask them tonight.
To continue with your bar analogy and relate to Stellar, the bar would be unlikely to have any involvement with cryptocurrency. Someone else would build on top of Stellar so that you could pay USD at a Japanese bar and the bar would receive yen.
All of the features exist on Stellar to do that today for far less than a cent in transaction fees, settlement time in minutes, and less carbon impact than a single Facebook data center. The major barriers are all around regulation in the "real world", something that no cryptocurrency is equipped to solve. :)
Correct. Unlike many other cryptocurrencies, the Stellar blockchain has the suitable use-case of powering CBDCs which is where more financial companies will side with if more regulations hit cryptocurrencies in the future.
> I’m not one of them. But it’s hard enough to get my nonagenarian grandfather to let me pay for dinner with my own payment card; I am not going to try to get him to accept Ethereum.
There are better cryptocurrencies that solves all of this and Stellar is one of them which is also being used for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) [0]