The fundamental problem is that money is trust. The whole point is to separate a transaction today from a transaction tomorrow, or to split or combine them, while trusting the value will be kept and not stolen. That is often misunderstood as being equivalent to holding a commodity like gold, but hoarding is not trading, and gold was a primitive experiment for money which failed often and had to be abandoned as real money nearly a century ago. The money we use today, like dollar, is compared to history a miracle of stability and trust forged by trial and error on banking and issuance. Most money (for good currencies) is issued in asset-backed loans which scale the money supply in balance with economic activity, so your future value is remarkably close to a constant amount of goods or services. It is this innovation in money that powers the modern world.
if you think money is not reliably stable then go back in history and find any era anywhere that a form of money existed with comparable stability to the last 50 years.
So what does crypto bring? A blockchain is effectively a notary public, tracking contracts for exchange. This is a great invention, although you are not totally decentralized. The backbone of the chain is not storing your contract and in some cases there maybe multiple intermediary documents between you and the chain itself (look at how Merkle trees work). If any intermediary layer disappears (the holder of a document which records your contract goes out of business, for example) then your contract may not be traceably linked to the blockchain. You could try to ensure you have a copy of any intermediate documents. Be prepared to use a lot of storage for every transaction you care about. Distributed trust means you keep your own records.
What the blockchain does not do is create currency in the sense of stable value. A BitCoin is a hyper-speculative phantom, wildly varying in value, appealing to the human hoarder instinct. It is more like the digital equivalent of a garage full of prized antiques than it is of money.
Stablecoins are like a quiet step away, linking something called a coin to some amount of real money. Imagine you take a $100 bill and you put it in an envelope, seal the envelope, and write "cryptocoin" on the front while you will find "break seal to use" in fine print. That is a stablecoin.
The history of money is about trust, and trust is a societal thing. From individuals to banks to government, behavior to justify trust took humans millennia to learn. Maybe the system needs to improve - sure - but if the first part of the pitch is "zero trust" then maybe you should be looking very, very carefully at the proposal. A charlatan is in hog-heaven if they do not need to begin their pitch with "Trust me...".
The fundamental problem is that money is trust. The whole point is to separate a transaction today from a transaction tomorrow, or to split or combine them, while trusting the value will be kept and not stolen. That is often misunderstood as being equivalent to holding a commodity like gold, but hoarding is not trading, and gold was a primitive experiment for money which failed often and had to be abandoned as real money nearly a century ago. The money we use today, like dollar, is compared to history a miracle of stability and trust forged by trial and error on banking and issuance. Most money (for good currencies) is issued in asset-backed loans which scale the money supply in balance with economic activity, so your future value is remarkably close to a constant amount of goods or services. It is this innovation in money that powers the modern world.
if you think money is not reliably stable then go back in history and find any era anywhere that a form of money existed with comparable stability to the last 50 years.
So what does crypto bring? A blockchain is effectively a notary public, tracking contracts for exchange. This is a great invention, although you are not totally decentralized. The backbone of the chain is not storing your contract and in some cases there maybe multiple intermediary documents between you and the chain itself (look at how Merkle trees work). If any intermediary layer disappears (the holder of a document which records your contract goes out of business, for example) then your contract may not be traceably linked to the blockchain. You could try to ensure you have a copy of any intermediate documents. Be prepared to use a lot of storage for every transaction you care about. Distributed trust means you keep your own records.
What the blockchain does not do is create currency in the sense of stable value. A BitCoin is a hyper-speculative phantom, wildly varying in value, appealing to the human hoarder instinct. It is more like the digital equivalent of a garage full of prized antiques than it is of money.
Stablecoins are like a quiet step away, linking something called a coin to some amount of real money. Imagine you take a $100 bill and you put it in an envelope, seal the envelope, and write "cryptocoin" on the front while you will find "break seal to use" in fine print. That is a stablecoin.
The history of money is about trust, and trust is a societal thing. From individuals to banks to government, behavior to justify trust took humans millennia to learn. Maybe the system needs to improve - sure - but if the first part of the pitch is "zero trust" then maybe you should be looking very, very carefully at the proposal. A charlatan is in hog-heaven if they do not need to begin their pitch with "Trust me...".