The problem is central banks devaluing currency. It's an esoteric topic to many people, so crypto turned into a blinking pinball machine of tech, but the problem was always the devaluing of currency by the Fed.
Plus while a bank may devalue its currency, the point of it is to keep it stable -- something we haven't seen from crypto in any meaningful sense. Even the so-called "stable coins" are anything but.
There's plenty of people out there who disagree with central bank's existence and policy. I don't know if I'd call a currency "stable" when it's lost 80% of it's own value since being introduced and can have new liquidity created with little due process. All currency is an illusion, it's just about which illusion makes you more comfortable.
It's all just money, and money isn't entirely rational to begin with.
Something that depreciates can still be stable. The US dollar loses value at a relatively predictable rate. We can see what an unstable currency looks like right now by looking at Argentina, where the peso has lost 47% of its value in a year.
BitCoin is more like the peso than the dollar, hence why its called unstable.
> All currency is an illusion, it's just about which illusion makes you more comfortable.
Currency isn't an illusion, it's a social construct, and its a deeply embedded social construct.
By that logic, Earth is tilting dangerously out of control and the moon is hurtling off into deep space.
This is exactly the issue that a lot of people have with them. Not to mention that the people in charge of adjusting the value of your life savings aren't even voted in...
Cryptocurrency aims to give you complete autonomy over your money. Something 99.99% of people don't currently have.
That sounds nice, but it doesn’t come for free. Price volatility, trust issues, etc. to name a few.
I think a key issue is that credit, money, wealth, currency, while related, are really different things but for many people all of it is “money”.
These are not specific to cryptocurrency. The trust issues are primarily a result of crypto scams and not innate to crypto. Just as scams involving dollars, euros etc., have nothing to do with the currency itself.
Where crypto shines on the trust aspect is that you don't have some guy in an ivory tower deciding to devalue your crypto by 5%/year. You can choose to buy into inflationary cryptos (doge coin for instance), or you can choose to buy into crypto's with fixed supply. No one can take your share of the supply away from you or change the rules on a whim. That's absolutely huge.
"Compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe" - Albert Einstein, supposedly. Central banks use that force against citizens and everyone just accepts it because it's been that way for so long.
> There’s a reason we have target rates
In an interview Powell admitted no one really knows why the target is 2%. Why is 2% better than 10%, why not 0%? We don't need to encourage consumption with artificial money devaluation, humans already discount the future because of the finiteness of our lives