No they're not valid points, they're purely subjective and with no comparison.

Oh and you are from one of those countries right?

No, your interest is most likely the same as almost everyone else in crypto - seeing the line go up.

> It's not like there are say 45 countries in this planet where woman are forbidden to manage money, have a company or even a bank account. Pff... preposterous right? Why should allow Mohamed to send money to his mother in Palest... I mean commit money laundering?

I haven't seen much evidence that crypto is actually heavily used for this. Its main use case remains mostly "tech casino" with huge costs.

Ooh yes and the value of bitcoin dropping 2/3 in a year is a wonderful thing for those oppressed countries right?

Are these people getting value for money with crypto or is someone fleecing them an awful lot for the privilege or not using fiat? Always these third person anecdotes without any actual evidence.

The other thing is not being controlled by government seems to imply either not controlled, or controlled by 'good' people, of which neither seems to be turning out true in any case.

With the possible exception of Afghanistan (although the Taliban can't seem to get even their own policy straight), I don't believe there are any countries where "woman are forbidden to manage money, have a company or even a bank account". For example, all those are not just possible but common in Saudi Arabia.

And you also haven't addressed how blockchain would improve women's lot, compared to, say, a stack of US$100 bills.

My trouble with the argument that crypto will liberate underprivileged classes in general is that it seems to miss key holistic issues I'm enumerating below. Perhaps I'm wrong, and I'd appreciate knowing the way I'm wrong.

1. Crypto wealth only translates into real wealth if there is either (a) vendors who accept native crypto as tender or (b) there are exchanges that convert from crypto to authorized legal tender in a country.

However, it seems (a) has not happened in a meaningful scale without (b), and (b) has been frustrated because of underlying price volatility, high fees, low transaction processing compared to traditional finance, etc. There's the problem of "too many cryptocurrencies" which frustrates user choice.

(I'm aware independent proposals to "fix" all of this have been proposed, but there don't seem to be any clear winners e.g. stablecoins should have "fix"ed price volatility, but the leading stablecoin - TerraCoin - collapsed.)

The net impact of this is that people are cut off from real-world markets they live in. Someone who has no access to traditional finance will not have an easier time purchasing goods and essentials with crypto wealth, and this their ability to participate is only marginally improved.

2. Crypto has higher barrier to entry than traditional finance because it requires higher than usual technical literacy, which people in these classes don't have. Wallets need protection, smart contracts need auditing, and so on. I would struggle getting people to use (say) hardware tokens.

3. There's nothing ultimately stopping governments from banning crypto exchanges or crypto vendors or more if they really want to prevent the disenfranchised from getting some. They might not eliminate the network, but they can certainly go after people for suspicion of participation in it (such as vendors). The crypto model requires governments to be foiled by technical limitations, but this is rarely the technique they need.

Based on all of this, it seems like basically you need to solve the problem of vendors really caring enough about crypto for regular folks to get an advantage when the advantage is not clear. Is this not the case? What have I missed?

And the US dollar punches well above its weight in "preserving freedom", despite all the rules, all the enforcement, all the regulation, all the threat of violence, all the drug wars.

Theatre.

The question is - are benefits of token systems outweigh the negatives? Since the purpose of all these systems is law avoidance (both "legitimate" and "oppressive", all of laws), then in my opinion negatives are much much bigger than benefits. And I say this as a person who can benefit from tokens, i.e. send my money cross border without any legal oversight. But in reality for a the few grey private transaction, the majority of this system usage will be utilised by corporations, billionaires, shady governments, mafia etc. Tokens in the current state are net negative for humans. And hypothetically tokens with control and oversight and protections are just overall worse and more limited digital "money".

Sure. The thing is, tokens provide a solution for ANY law avoidance and can be used by ANY person. That's the problem. As soon as the very short period of nerds inventing and using the system passes, then big sharks come. All the billionares washing their stolen and almost stolen money are very fond of tokens, some are actually making money in that space, people like Alex, Sam, Giancarlo, Paolo, Zhao etc.

First - I think you are wrong about "war" part. I'm reasonably sure that global military industrial complex mostly uses digital money transfers. I think what you were talking about was a small scale rebel or terrorist armed operations, but those are rounding errors in the scale of proper war industry.

Second - you are quite right that cash is used for that and without it such activities will greatly diminish. Though I suspect that they will switch to barter economy.

Third - that will happen soon. Some governments are already restricting cash, though mostly the ones that are doing so are fighting not against wars or cartels, but against their local oligarchs funneling money from the country (the same problem I described in other comments). Many countries have already restricted moving cash across the border, so there it's not used for this a lot.