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...
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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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(Most of the other problems are not a problem of existing currencies, but about entrenched incumbents in transactions with regular currencies?)
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Banks and payment processors aren't allowed to provide privacy due to government regulation, and a lot of their aggressive censorship and freezing of payments is based on that. Often, the reason they don't tell you why they froze it is because they're forbidden from doing that.
The government requires that they know and confirm the identity of their customers. They require them to police payments to identify money laundering and various suspicious things. They aren't punished for being overly aggressive, so the cheapest approach is being very ban happy.
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The way traditional payment systems work is pretty much like Content ID on YouTube. People have payments / accounts frozen all the time with no recourse for ridiculous reasons or because a heuristic wrongly triggered. It's understaffed and they won't take unnecessary legal risk.
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