That's the big question. But assuming for a moment that crypto can act as a substitute for traditional centralized payment systems, then it has significant advantages in some contexts over those systems.
Except that, fundamentally, distributed permission-less systems can't come close to the computational efficiency of centralized systems. So this is like "assuming perpetual motion machines existed, we could build a post-scarcity society" levels of assumption.
With zk-proofs, the redundancy of a blockchain can be significantly reduced without comprimising security. What redundancy remains provides the high process integrity that critical applications like financial transactions require.
It’s been around for a bit already, why is it not more widely adopted compared to BTC/ETH, any thoughts?
https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-...
zcash initially used zk-proofs only for privacy. It is only now looking to utilize it for scalability.