When it comes to crypto currencies, I fail to see what problems they solve. Most of them seem imagined?
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Cash offers fantastic privacy and censorship resistance. There are a couple decent cryptocurrency projects building electronic, peer-to-peer cash. Banking, credit cards, payment processors, etc. are a cesspool of surveillance and invasive control over people's usage of money.
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I wouldn't have been able to continue my independent security research work in the same way without Bitcoin. I need to receive international payments for both contract work and donations. Banks and PayPal freeze and censor payments without explanation and don't offer privacy.
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There's contract work that I wouldn't have been able to do because the client couldn't send me an international wire transfer or use PayPal. Those fees are also substantial, especially since for PayPal they skim off a percentage of each transfer for contract income payments.
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The majority of donations to support my open source work have been made through Bitcoin rather than PayPal. I could offer credit card donations via Stripe, but that loses 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction, and from past experience even without a product sold there are many issues.
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Payments get disputed, and you're charged a $15 fee for the privilege of a person or bank getting a transaction reversed. They also absolutely love freezing your balance. Especially when selling a product payment processors are a massive pain. Ask someone with a small business.
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Look at shopify.ca/legal/terms-pa as an example of financial censorship.
> Products or services that are otherwise prohibited by our financial partners
>
> phone services, and cell phones; telemarketing, telecommunications equipment and telephone sales
Cannot even sell a phone...
A business can be destroyed at any moment when a payment processor decides to ban them from the platform. It puts a few massive corporations into the position of acting as a branch of law enforcement without due process along with arbitrarily policing morality as they choose.
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