On Sun, Aug 5, 2018 at 11:01 AM, John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:

why don't you use Paypal? Internal transactions are fast and free, value is ... exchangable into banks all over the world.

No different than say BCH is today. Nor do decentralized cryptocurrencies lie and hide the real costs, it's right there in the tx. Nothing is ever free.

Before arguing that they're not trustworthy

They're not, commercially arbitrary middlemen are a bitch.

please compare the number of people who trust Paypal to do their transactions (on the order of 200 million) with those who use any sort of cryptocurrency. Why are they all wrong?

Completely invalid comparisons. Paypal has been around a decade longer than cryptocurrency. Ebay rammed its spamvertising integration of Paypal down its user's eyballs and inboxes, hounding them relentlessly to sign up for it, and skewing their policies and features in favor of it over both P2P OOB and their own fiat proxy system. Cryptocurrency users are all right, because they voluntarily chose to search and pull down the info, learn about it, and adopt it freely, all against massive torrents of FUD coming from vested anti's and blue pilled sheeple. Cryptocurrency value moved every month is 30x paypal's and growing. Ten more years and those 200 million users will be on cryptocurrency.

But again, what's your threat model?

One of the most basic... loss of freedom. Lots of videos and conferences out there on that, here's just one... https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cryptopulco

If an issuer doesn't redeem a bill what recourse do you have other than to denounce him?

Cryptocurrency... you either have the keys and value or you don't.

[etc, etc, etc]

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bitcoin+documentary What's in your wallet?