What could you do with a USD stablecoin that you can't do with a regular old dollar? Other than let everyone see your transactions and account balances.
Examples: converting it to another token on a decentralized exchange, purchasing an NFT, holding the token in a non-custodial wallet, holding the token in a multi-signatory wallet, participating in DAOs, using a smart contract to handle decentralized escrow, interacting with decentralized lending protocols and liquidity providers.
A government-backed crypto currency would come with a wallet. The central bank becomes both the issuer of money as well as host your account. This makes other banks largely obsolete.
Assuming it to be the main and only currency, transaction privacy fully ends. Transaction blocking and censorship would be the push of a button, pretty much your entire digital existence and access to things can be wiped out at will. Given that the majority of the world lives in an authoritarian regime, not at all a far-fetched scenario.
Money would also be programmable. The central bank can apply its monetary policy directly to your wallet. Stimulus money. Interest rates based on your behavior. The blocking of purchasing particular categories of products. Anything, really.
Like why have digital banking infrastructure at all? What new thing was enabled by digital banking infra? The answer is that nothing new was enabled, but the tech made banking operations faster and more accessible to more people. The same thing applies to blockchain tech.
Consider that the internet works because it is permissive in what it accepts. What if money was abstracted from the states monetary policy, and it was as frictionless as any other internet protocol. The internet experiment changes our lives every day, in ways we cannot fathom.
I'm old enough to have lived in a cash society. We got paid in cash and paid for things in cash. You can send cash to others. Without a cap. We didn't own some government an explanation on what we do with our money, as it's none of their damn business. "Guilty by default, prove me that you're not" is to be rejected.
Society had less crime not more. Moreover, things like capital controls do nothing at all. Criminals with half a brain are quite obviously going to work around publicly known limitations.
Citation needed, at least if you're defining crime in the sense of what's experienced by regular people. Being a victim of violence was much more likely in those days, and the fact that you could easily spend the money of someone you mugged was a significant factor in that.
> Moreover, things like capital controls do nothing at all. Criminals with half a brain are quite obviously going to work around publicly known limitations.
The point isn't to eliminate it entirely but to make it more costly, and in that regard they seem to have been quite successful.
The difference is the decentralization of it, but why is that an advantage? We've had hundreds/thousands of years working out the kinks of, say, how to operate an escrow provider. Replacing that all with "smart" contracts just opens you up to hacks of poorly written code, of which Ethereum itself is a prime example.
Take decentralized escrow, which underpins auctions, crowdfunds, markets, atomic swaps and more: it does not require a private third party.
Most traditional escrow are companies that will do data collection, long settlement windows, arbitrary thresholds, high take-fees, and restrictions based on locale.
A decentralized, open source, forkable, global, instant-settlement, ownerless, and feeless protocol to handle escrow of digital assets is rather novel.
If you think you can write a better spec for a transferable non-fungible record of ownership, like a domain name asset, that works across any EVM blockchain, go for it. It’s an open system, hence why other specs like ERC1155 exist and find traction to meet different needs.
These kinds of open source and decentralized standards and protocols is also what gave us the web. It is valuable to have a system that is built on open protocols rather than a closed and highly permissioned infrastructure.
Who often are the exchanges.
"When in a gold rush, sell spades" is old hat. Now it is "sell spades but also denominate everything in the SpadesRUs Prospecting Emporium in SpadeCoin scrip" and relieve people of their dollars at the door before they've even laid hands on a spade.
https://mashable.com/article/ethereum-gas-fees-skyrocket-bor...
> If you were trying to complete a transaction on the Ethereum network last night, you might have been taken aback by the ridiculously high gas fees you saw. For example, one user purchased a $25 NFT on Saturday evening. Their total price? $3,325. That's $3,300 just in fees.
I'll stick with USD, I think.
https://www.frbservices.org/financial-services/fednow/about....
Yeah, ETH has high fees. Don't use it directly. Use an L2, Polygon, or something else where fees are pennies or less. ETH is not a good chain to be on for the average user, unless you have a lot of money to waste on gas.
Personally, I'm most familiar with other chains like Polygon, Aurora, Harmony, etc. Dealing with large sums of money is a non-issue. Ever.