Every blockchain initiative being explored by financial institutions is not decentralized. Unless you're tossing out the banking system to directly transact with other parties using digital currencies, in which case: good luck, I don't have a rebuttal except to say I doubt that will become mainstream enough to be ubiquitous and convenient, but maybe I'm wrong.
> 1. Censorship resistance.
I don't personally care about this; do you think most people do?
> 2. Irreversibility of payments.
That's admittedly cool, but I personally don't want that either. Great for vendors I suppose, but I like being able to e.g. issue chargebacks with AmEx when there is legitimate fraud. I don't think there is a technical solution that satisfies both buyers and sellers and mitigates fraud on both sides.
> 3. Permissionless.
I don't really understand this, I have accounts with several banks that didn't run credit checks before I opened an account. They did an identity verification, but they didn't care about my creditworthiness for a checking account. Moreover, these were national banking chains with online account signup and approval, so it isn't limited to regional availability.
Other than that - I agree permissionless is a cool feature, but I don't particularly want to transact with people in a permissionless system. The natural extrapolation of a permissionless system is one in which there are fewer safeguards for e.g. verifying a user's identity, and (speaking as someone who works in cryptography research here), I don't think schemes that enable two parties to transact without mutually trusting each other are a worthwhile problem for a technical solution in the real world.
Regarding 1. If I understand this correctly, then I believe that this is only partly true. How do you buy bitcoin? You need fiat currencies in a current account or a credit card. How do you get that? You need a bank account. At that stage you will get verified and a state could censor you.
Regarding 2. Actually, there are real-time payment systems around the globe that are also irreversible. E.g. Faster Payments in the UK. SEPA Instant will launch with the Euro in November 2017. The company I co-founded even offers an API to initiate Faster Payments from the backend of any app: https://www.telleroo.com/faster-payments-api
To be honest, it's mostly the US that is not up to date here.
Regarding 3. It maybe permissionless now but that is mostly because it is not regulated. As soon as it becomes regulated as a financial service you will have all the same processes that you already have for financial products. Will it ever get regulated? Of course! As someone who works in the financial space I can tell you that, for example Anti-Money Laundering legislation is extremely important to regulators and they will push this through with force.
I don't want to sound too discouraging, cryptocurrencies are really cool. But the question is if payments is actually the right area for them. All of the problems above can and are already currently being solved by non-crypto solutions. I highly encourage you to take a look at the fintech market in the UK who are tackling all these challenges. Furthermore, these fintechs are expanding to the US and around the globe where they will solve those problems.
1 - I think many people care. Maybe you are not considering the other 7 billion people on the planet who have drastically different life situations. I believe it's the key reason why people are so divided about whether cryptocurrencies are useful or not. Just because a feature isn't useful to you doesn't mean it's not useful to others.
2 - Yet you tolerate the irreversibility of cash. So it's probably not such a big deal. Besides, most merchants are honest (the need to charge back a CC transaction is extremely rare.) I also think one of the potential great use cases of Bitcoin is informal person-to-person transactions (paying back lunch money to a friend, giving money to family, etc). Irreversibility is irrelevant, actually desired, in those cases.
3 - Once again I think you are not considering the situation of others. In the US alone, millions are denied banking accounts https://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/news/cnfall13/denied... This is severly handicapping them given that a bank account is practically required for participation in the modern economy.
Thank you for intelligently and politely discussing. Too many critics of cryptocurrencies are borderline aggressive/insulting and I've never understood why.
Every blockchain initiative being explored by financial institutions is not decentralized. Unless you're tossing out the banking system to directly transact with other parties using digital currencies, in which case: good luck, I don't have a rebuttal except to say I doubt that will become mainstream enough to be ubiquitous and convenient, but maybe I'm wrong.
> 1. Censorship resistance.
I don't personally care about this; do you think most people do?
> 2. Irreversibility of payments.
That's admittedly cool, but I personally don't want that either. Great for vendors I suppose, but I like being able to e.g. issue chargebacks with AmEx when there is legitimate fraud. I don't think there is a technical solution that satisfies both buyers and sellers and mitigates fraud on both sides.
> 3. Permissionless.
I don't really understand this, I have accounts with several banks that didn't run credit checks before I opened an account. They did an identity verification, but they didn't care about my creditworthiness for a checking account. Moreover, these were national banking chains with online account signup and approval, so it isn't limited to regional availability.
Other than that - I agree permissionless is a cool feature, but I don't particularly want to transact with people in a permissionless system. The natural extrapolation of a permissionless system is one in which there are fewer safeguards for e.g. verifying a user's identity, and (speaking as someone who works in cryptography research here), I don't think schemes that enable two parties to transact without mutually trusting each other are a worthwhile problem for a technical solution in the real world.