There are five layers of logical error in your argument here, any one of which would invalidate your argument on its own:
In your examples with the US government and Amazon, the US government and Amazon could easily do this “middleman” verification work themselves. No middleman required.
Even if you use a middleman, the US government and Amazon totally control this situation—they own and completely control everything about these fictional currencies! - and so they are able to renege on their guarantees or otherwise cheat you at any time. A middleman can’t stop them from doing that—only the law can, which is not reliant on crypto. So letting them manage the transactions, as suggested in point 1, isn’t handing them any more power.
Even if you had to use a middleman, it wouldn’t be much less expensive to leave all that verification to the government, and middleman fees are small anyway. You’re zeroing in on a hypothetical problem that basically does not exist in reality! It’s extremely rare to hear about PayPal or Visa or Mastercard defrauding their users, and these businesses are in competition to provide the lowest fees. Meanwhile, the crypto ecosystem is burdened by gas fees and massive electrical/computer hardware losses, depending on whether you use PoS or PoW. Plus, the legal infrastructure which prevents Visa from defrauding users doesn’t exist yet for crypto, and if it did, then the arguments about crypto letting you evade regulation (i.e. commit money laundering) would disappear. There’s no way to win here. Crypto is just worse, and it always will be.
You’re arguing that crypto might be more trustworthy than these established middlemen, who have long histories of abiding by financial regulations? We all know that the crypto ecosystem is teeming with scams; it’s a safe bet that scams would pop up to take advantage of these new cryptocurrencies.
Crypto technology is inefficient garbage. Here, a computer science professor explains how you can make a system that does everything Bitcoin does, with a tiny fraction of the electrical consumption, using a network of ten Raspberry Pi mini-computers: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/05/why-this-computer-scientist-says-all-cryptocurrency-should-die-in-a-fireEven if all my previous four arguments are nonsense, the US government or Amazon could save money and resources by using this extremely primitive system instead of crypto, and still get all the supposed benefits.
There are five layers of logical error in your argument here, any one of which would invalidate your argument on its own:
In your examples with the US government and Amazon, the US government and Amazon could easily do this “middleman” verification work themselves. No middleman required.
Even if you use a middleman, the US government and Amazon totally control this situation—they own and completely control everything about these fictional currencies! - and so they are able to renege on their guarantees or otherwise cheat you at any time. A middleman can’t stop them from doing that—only the law can, which is not reliant on crypto. So letting them manage the transactions, as suggested in point 1, isn’t handing them any more power.
Even if you had to use a middleman, it wouldn’t be much less expensive to leave all that verification to the government, and middleman fees are small anyway. You’re zeroing in on a hypothetical problem that basically does not exist in reality! It’s extremely rare to hear about PayPal or Visa or Mastercard defrauding their users, and these businesses are in competition to provide the lowest fees. Meanwhile, the crypto ecosystem is burdened by gas fees and massive electrical/computer hardware losses, depending on whether you use PoS or PoW. Plus, the legal infrastructure which prevents Visa from defrauding users doesn’t exist yet for crypto, and if it did, then the arguments about crypto letting you evade regulation (i.e. commit money laundering) would disappear. There’s no way to win here. Crypto is just worse, and it always will be.
You’re arguing that crypto might be more trustworthy than these established middlemen, who have long histories of abiding by financial regulations? We all know that the crypto ecosystem is teeming with scams; it’s a safe bet that scams would pop up to take advantage of these new cryptocurrencies.
Crypto technology is inefficient garbage. Here, a computer science professor explains how you can make a system that does everything Bitcoin does, with a tiny fraction of the electrical consumption, using a network of ten Raspberry Pi mini-computers: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/05/why-this-computer-scientist-says-all-cryptocurrency-should-die-in-a-fire Even if all my previous four arguments are nonsense, the US government or Amazon could save money and resources by using this extremely primitive system instead of crypto, and still get all the supposed benefits.