I have this pet theory that the idea of decentralized currency is a bit ahead of its time, and the best consumer use case is for frequent travelers since you could more easily sidestep foreign exchange issues, and hassles.
There's a bunch of backend and b2b use cases to be explored but those also take time.
> frequent travelers since you could more easily sidestep foreign exchange issues
I don't travel internationally very frequently, but whenever I do my credit card handles currency exchange for me automatically. Perhaps I'm not getting the best exchange rate, but the difference is minimal enough that looking into alternatives isn't worth the hassle.
A paragraph from the previous essay by the OP comes to mind:
> Less sardonically, there is a lesson here: systems which intermediate between cultures are useful. Intermediating between cultures is a thing the world urgently needs and is extremely prepared to pay for.
I don't think decentralized currency will actually solve the issues travelers have with this, at least without reproducing much of the infrastructure already in place for traditional currencies.
In a quasicapitalist utopia, crypto would be a very convenient way to enable the government to set a stock value for a universal cryptocredit and make that credit its default method of value transfer.
They could do something like pin the value to 1 credit = 1 hour of unskilled menial labor, and strictly control the supply.
With appropriate software monitoring and a lack of other methods of direct wealth transfer, it would make it impossible to not properly pay your taxes and vastly more difficult to exchange wealth without government oversight, and make money crimes vastly more difficult, from hiring criminals to do crimes to purchasing drugs and weapons for illicit purposes.
It's the perfect system for a dictatorship as well.
There's a bunch of backend and b2b use cases to be explored but those also take time.
All this assumes the volatility issue is solved.