Buttcoin

i can kinda understand "liking the idea" in the same way that I "like" the very simple currency systems in single-player video games, where you do work (fight monsters, collect items, win Pokemon battles) and are automatically rewarded with currency you can use to buy items, which are always reasonably-priced because the game developers balanced it that way. It's just that these systems have nothing to do with reality. But that simplistic view of money is pretty much all that's left of cryptocurrencies if you look past the get-rich-quick scheme.

"I like everything about cryptocurrency except all the things that are wrong with it".

Not really sure why currency has to be "outside the control of any single person or entity". Other than an intellectual curiosity. Currency is inherently social. Goldbugs keep harping on about the inherent value of gold, but its value is just as socially constructed as cowry shells or giant granite rings. China was a huge trading party in the time before the Opium wars and it preferred silver to gold.

The existence of a currency that everyone can transact in is fundamentally a public good. It must be maintained with the public good in mind, rather than the good of whoever happens to have lots of it or whoever has the ability to personally influence it.

Are you sure something that something that approximates this is a good thing?

Not to mention that I don't think it's possible to truely make something like that in the physical sense. You can make Forward Time Traveling Anal ZProof Coinbutt that gives you free Blockchain blowjobs, shit is about as good as using the money in SimCity 3000 save files as a medium of exchange if it doesn't connect to reality (i.e. has a system of sourcing and managing information in a reliable manner).

Or am I missing something? Genuinely curious.

You often hear crypto proponents on Threadi (not the oort cloud of types who de facto only care about high risk speculation and are pushing bags, the genuine ones) say that they want to use crypto as a way to fight data brokers/collection, but that doesn't make sense (to me). The payment is just one step of the process and you can't leave civilization at scale.

But for me personally, I don't see the point of such a system if one can't manage current challenges with human organisation in democratic leaning countries or perhaps even more broadly (at whatever level/scale that is relevant for you). It seems like you would just be back at square one but with more wallets, random useless shit you have to memorize and having to track client/protocols updates and some other crap.

Sure we might get a technology at some point in the future that truly impacts human nature, but in that case all bets are off and we are entering pretty avangarde sci-fi.