> Yes, completely glossing over the usefulness of digital-native money: instant, verifiable transactions from anywhere in the world, programmable money and low fees.
However, these properties are not exactly specific to "digital-native money":
* Instant: banks can transfer money instantly between accounts as long as both accounts belong to the same bank. In Europe I can name Raiffeisen and ING as two examples and I believe that Wells Fargo in the US has instant transfers as long as both accounts are opened at the same bank and probably there are more. And in most case there are no "gas" fees for those transfers.
* Verifiable: all bank transactions are verifiable (at least internally, banks are forced to have an audit department) and in all cases you receive a receipt for your transaction. If you want to verify all the transactions yourself, glossing over the severe privacy issues that a blockchain will introduce (once you know the real ID of a wallet, you'll know all the finances of a person), it's not that easy to validate crypto transactions "from anywhere in the world": Ethereum requires more than a TB of space and Solana validator requirements basically point to an expensive server running in a datacenter (at least 128GB of RAM and 300Mbit symmetrical network bandwidth). Even Bitcoin's blockchain is several GB large which is very unwieldy to sync in areas with slow or bad internet connection (yes, DSL is still a thing).
* Programmable money: I'm guessing this would be the take on "smart contracts", but this is far for being perfect because you still need to trust that the code in the smart contract triggers the right action. For example, if I were to buy a laptop from somebody using a smart contract I will still need to trust that the smart contract will trigger the entire flow of sending the correct laptop using a courier to my place. A way around it would be to have the owner send the laptop to a third-party and the third-party would have some sort of reputation for correctly implementing the outcome of smart contracts, but we're back again at trusting a central authority and the entire flow could be implemented using regular code, so what's the point of smart contracts?
* Low fees: there are a lot of fees associated with cryptocurrency transactions on top of several "blockchain fees" like Ethereum's gas. For example, the service fee for using MetaMask is 0.875% of the transaction, or if I move $1000 from one account to another using MetaMask will cost me $8.75. I currently pay $0 for moving from one account to another one as long as they are opened the same bank.
Cryptocurrencies can have some legitimate benefits in specific situations (I'd imagine that transactions between parties in areas with no or very bad/expensive Internet access can be more trustworthy using cryptocurrencies), but I doubt these cases are as frequent as many people claim they are. I'd argue that by far the most interesting use would be to use cryptocurrencies as stores of value and have them regulate as some sort of equity because this would allow Wall Street to do all kinds of funky things with them :-)
The best take I've heard was from Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy, who was explaining a couple of months ago how it's much better to invest into Bitcoin because you can easily split it and move it to another country should the tax be too high, while buying a lot of land in New York requires paying a property tax and can even be devalued based on the zoning.
However, these properties are not exactly specific to "digital-native money":
* Instant: banks can transfer money instantly between accounts as long as both accounts belong to the same bank. In Europe I can name Raiffeisen and ING as two examples and I believe that Wells Fargo in the US has instant transfers as long as both accounts are opened at the same bank and probably there are more. And in most case there are no "gas" fees for those transfers.
* Verifiable: all bank transactions are verifiable (at least internally, banks are forced to have an audit department) and in all cases you receive a receipt for your transaction. If you want to verify all the transactions yourself, glossing over the severe privacy issues that a blockchain will introduce (once you know the real ID of a wallet, you'll know all the finances of a person), it's not that easy to validate crypto transactions "from anywhere in the world": Ethereum requires more than a TB of space and Solana validator requirements basically point to an expensive server running in a datacenter (at least 128GB of RAM and 300Mbit symmetrical network bandwidth). Even Bitcoin's blockchain is several GB large which is very unwieldy to sync in areas with slow or bad internet connection (yes, DSL is still a thing).
* Programmable money: I'm guessing this would be the take on "smart contracts", but this is far for being perfect because you still need to trust that the code in the smart contract triggers the right action. For example, if I were to buy a laptop from somebody using a smart contract I will still need to trust that the smart contract will trigger the entire flow of sending the correct laptop using a courier to my place. A way around it would be to have the owner send the laptop to a third-party and the third-party would have some sort of reputation for correctly implementing the outcome of smart contracts, but we're back again at trusting a central authority and the entire flow could be implemented using regular code, so what's the point of smart contracts?
* Low fees: there are a lot of fees associated with cryptocurrency transactions on top of several "blockchain fees" like Ethereum's gas. For example, the service fee for using MetaMask is 0.875% of the transaction, or if I move $1000 from one account to another using MetaMask will cost me $8.75. I currently pay $0 for moving from one account to another one as long as they are opened the same bank.
Cryptocurrencies can have some legitimate benefits in specific situations (I'd imagine that transactions between parties in areas with no or very bad/expensive Internet access can be more trustworthy using cryptocurrencies), but I doubt these cases are as frequent as many people claim they are. I'd argue that by far the most interesting use would be to use cryptocurrencies as stores of value and have them regulate as some sort of equity because this would allow Wall Street to do all kinds of funky things with them :-)
The best take I've heard was from Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy, who was explaining a couple of months ago how it's much better to invest into Bitcoin because you can easily split it and move it to another country should the tax be too high, while buying a lot of land in New York requires paying a property tax and can even be devalued based on the zoning.