Also, the blatant scam nature of them is a bit of a problem.
While there's a lot of hype, the Washington Post already printed the truth in 2015 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitco... which an economy professor have nicely expanded on in two blog posts https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon... https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-pon...
Put another way, there is nothing inherently scammy in using a distributed blockchain to record balances, and cryptography to authenticate updates to the balances. While opening the door to financial contracts to every one in the world with a computing device may make scam offerings more common, it's overly simplistic and lazy to resort to a caricature of crypto tokens being, as a rule, scams.
Articles like the ones you linked above want a return to serfdom, under the control of officialdom. There is no other conceivable reason why someone would not want people to have at least the option of taking custody over their own money, in a form more useful than physical cash.
In long lived immutable digital systems, guess what, that doesn't exist.
Talk to your actual scientist cousins, crypto-graphers.
If we're at the "totalitarian government" stage, "easily readable immutable data source" is EXACTLY what they'd dream of.
In any case, anonymity is a gradient. It's a question of how much resources a state has to expend to track a user, and that value can be increased with better privacy technology, so that the state has to eschew broad-based restrictions on mutually voluntary interactions and focus its investigative resources on only the most dangerous actors, who engage in genuinely predatory behavior (murderers, thieves, etc).
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu...
> Ordinary person: “Your weird Internet money sucks to use. It’s slow and expensive. I lost my coins by mistake and it can’t be fixed. If I get hacked it can’t be fixed either.”
> Bitcoin advocate: “But everyone wants [list of ideological aims held only by weird people]! Everyone I know, anyway.”
But in specifics, censorship resistance? I just read that in an article.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sex-workers-crypto-failing-t...
> “You get on an exchange for as long as you can, until they shut your ass down,” says Knox. “You quickly [run out of exchanges], so you sit on a lot of useless money. The whole ‘crypto is permissionless and censorship-resistant’ thing is a bunch of bullshit.”
All your sophistry aside that is.
Please read the responses and don't encourage flame wars.
> The only fundamental difference inherent to the respective designs of blockchains and traditional banking, is censorship resistance through genuine self-custody.
Then this is nonsense. The fundamental difference between the two is that one deals with real money while the other does not.
It’s just people have limited amount of time in a day, and caring that government X can trace their transaction is waste of time. Also, in the last 3 years of lawsuits, we’ve kind of seen how crypto payments are traceable as well if someone really wants to find the source.