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> Using bitcoin I can send money to someone in Chi no a who's social rating was degraded by the CCP and who is forbidden from using banks

How will they convert it into something they can use to pay rent and buy groceries?

> Crime will exist forever and criminals will find ways to finance themselves anyway, so the use of cryptocurrencies for their operations is not really a factor.

Does this make it easier for the wealthy to evade taxes? I find just signing transactions using something like gpg a much easier to reason about.

My biggest concern about cryptocurrency is fees. There is no reason why fees should be based on payload as far as I understand. Whether I’m sending one satoshi (or any other unit of money) or a trillion, the cost should be the same and ideally as close to zero as possible if not zero. This was the original reason I was drawn to bitcoin but it was obvious it would never be the case.

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> How will they convert it into something they can use to pay rent and buy groceries?

Exactly my question. Exchanges where you can sell the crypto for real money are still regulated and require KYC.

> My biggest concern about cryptocurrency is fees.

High fees are required to pay for the insane electricity bills and specialized hardware. PoW cryptos are expensive and inefficient by design so there will always be more transactions waiting in the queue to get on the chain than the processing power required to mine the next block.

Black market p2p exchanges will rise inevitably.

You don't even need black market. On one the largest crypto exchanges in India (WazirX), P2P is the only viable option left to get money into exchange because most banks have stopped dealing with them.

p2p exchanges were the first exchanges, only did the regulated KYC ones came later.

Fees are based on resource usage. In Bitcoin this is usually the total data size of inputs and outputs that are used to make the sum. This is where the issue of dust arises, when an address holds a mass quantity of low value inputs, but combing them yields a very large and therefore costly transaction.

In some other chains, like Ethereum, the accounting is ledger based. With these systems theres is no variety in input count, but it similarly scales by transaction computation so more complex contracts are more expensive.

Both networks have a fluctuating transaction cost due to congestion competition, but the “base cost” in either is totally unaffected by the value/total amount of currency.

You mean that I can have 1btc in 1 piece, or have basically 0 usable btc if I have 1btc gained in like a 1000 small transactions over time?

So when I “spend” that fragmented 1 btc, it all gets eaten up by fees?

There was a update on bitcoin last year ("taproot") to improve that issue.

Prior to that it was absolutely the case that multiple sender addresses caused multiple fees.

Not sure about other cryptocurrency.

Nano (https://nano.org/) for example has zero fees and transactions are instant

Nano favors early adopters even more than BTC does. The only way to obtain nano is to buy it from someone who already has it.

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