But once you can't, then the temptation to coerce people into "the right way" is going to be too big.
Then you need to hope you don't need to go to a gay bar in an anti gay state, pay for an abortion without your parent knowing, or give financial support to a controversial political group.
The issue would only arise if cash was eliminated.
I completely agree on the need for cash, but as long as we’re also keeping cash a digital USD would solve every problem crypto claims to solve while still allowing for a non dystopian future.
In fact, crypto is completely dystopian because there is absolutely no space for cash in it, and further, by being distributed and therefore pseudonymous at best, it actually opens massive privacy and security pandora boxes.
Then yes, a perfect ledger for all monetary transactions would be great, espacially for big sums.
Appart from that, the current financial system is mostly digital and satisfactory for day to day payments.
Is this true of all coins though? I know little about crypto, but I gather from reading on here while the privacy of bitcoin was greatly exaggerated/false other coins use actually privacy respecting schemes. Of course, that would assume that the schemes they use work perfectly which is probably a ridiculous assumption.
I don't think crypto positions itself as the only option (Bitcoin maxis aside). So there is definitely space for cash, space for tokenized USD, space for collateralized algo stablecoins.
Why distributed implies "pseudonimous at best"? Have you looked into what can be done with zero-knowledge proofs? With MPC?