I like the idea behind decentralised currency and I value the ideals of those wanting to free themselves from the four or five financial institutions controlling the world, but the people who want to buy groceries with their Bitcoin are a tiny minority. Cryptocurrency has become a vessel for speculation, fraud, and money laundering, abusing the good intentions of its inventors.

During the Bitcoin hype, some online stores actually started taking cryptocurrency as payment, but few stores still have that option available. For a sweet, short period there was a glimpse of hope for cryptocurrency, but that quickly collapsed.

Your first point accentuates that there are too many options to transfer blockchain money for most normal people. Living in a place where payment terminals in supermarkets don’t accept credit cards (debit card based culture) and where banks decided to go with Maestro rather than Mastercard, I can tell you from experience that “you need to pay with a different thing here” will confuse the hell out of people.

Your second point is actually the problem behind cryptocurrency that’ll make it impossible to use as a real currency. There are no control mechanisms, so the value jumps around wildly. You’d be smart to store your money through cryptocurrencies in countries with explosive inflation (Argentina, Turkey) but when a country’s currency starts to collapse, limits to exchanging money are often the first policies to get inflation back under control, so there’s a real risk you’ll end up unable to access your money because banks suddenly refuse to take your return transfer.

Your third point is kind of invalidated by the fact you default to naming Lightning as your primary fast transaction mechanism, since it operates on Bitcoin which is stuck in the PoW world and probably always will be. It’s major competitor Ethereum is kind of okay these days, but gas prices make it useless for doing any real payments so you’ll end up using some kind of wrapper for that too.

You can’t compare a form of government to a product, so I’m not sure what the democracy argument is about.

And let’s be honest, for mainstream consumers, the Linux desktop and the Fediverse are failures. How many of your real life friends and family have a Lemmy account compared to Facebook or Twitter? Even within my tech nerd bubble most people stick with mainstream services and mainstream operating systems. The best thing to happen to the Linux desktop was Valve picking it up and stuffing it into a console. Android deserves an honorable mention, but they way that got Linux into the mainstream was to hide Linux as much as possible. Twitter started collapsing and Bluesky and fucking Threads ate Mastodon’s lunch. The Fediverse sure has grown, but unless you’re into Linux or computers, you won’t find a Twitter or even Reddit alternative here.

Even still, I myself can get my social media itch scratched by the Fediverse, but I still can’t pay for my groceries through Dogecoin or Lightning or Ethereum.

There are also reasons why I’m not planning on using an iteration of cryptocurrency for real life finances even if such a thing becomes available. Most importantly, the public payment history associated with wallets. It’s not exactly difficult to link wallets to companies once they start operating at larger scales and soon enough you’ll have companies selling your payment history (and wage/employer history) straight off the blockchain. Unfortunately, that’s not really something that can be fixed with the current model.

There’s also the theft problem: if someone steals my bank account details and uses it to transfer all of my money to a foreign country, my bank will lock down my account and probably call me. Steal my wallet seed phrase and everything is gone in an instant, with no recourse. This adds major risk to keeping any significant amount of money in cryptocurrency form, and both enthusiasts and professionals have lost millions upon billions this way.