Crypto is a just a tool that enables that. They have no interest whatsoever in democratization, self-custodial finance, or frictionless payments across borders for anyone but themselves.

Direct p2p payments a "hard problem" because it directly contradicts what we consider to be one of the central pillars of national sovereignty, control over your national currency.

Crypto as a whole is in denial about this because there is no path forward without expecting nations to either give up one of their most effective levers of control, or expecting them to turn a blind eye to external actors eroding that control in real time.

Who exactly is "we" here? Because that's not true in a lot of (sovereign) countries in the world. Probably the most famous example being the Euro, and maybe the closest example to you is the United States Dollar which is an official currency in countries that have no control over the currency itself.

The CEO of coinbase recently said on a podcast that in the future, he expects stablecoins to wipe out all but ten currencies in the world.

This is a ludicrous statement that's gonna get Coinbase banned from many of these countries, and end up being subject to much, much more regulation than they expect.

Like, just because the US is currently pro-crypto doesn't mean that the rest of the global regulators have changed.

Control of the currency is one of the core governmental functions, I find it hard to imagine a world where governments are OK with this.

And more generally, if this is your plan, it's profoundly idiotic to say it in public before you've accomplished it, as you're giving your counterparties more time to adjust (which you probably don't want).

> Though my guess is that some smaller countries with less sophisticated monetary regimes may actually be excited about escaping the petrodollar world economy.

I find this unlikely, but we'll see I guess.

Are you not aware about the countries that are seemingly OK with this already? There are countries that don't have their own national currency and instead rely on United States Dollar, so obviously what you say doesn't always apply.

> I find this unlikely, but we'll see I guess.

Why? They're already in a "hard to imagine world" (from your perspective) since they don't have control over their own currency, wouldn't it be "easier to imagine" that they move to a currency no one control?

This is generally making the best of a bad situation. Like, I'm from a country that was pegged to another country's currency for a long time, and it caused lots and lots of problems.

Now, I'm part of a currency union, and that too causes lots and lots of problems. I'm not sure why any government would want to give up currency control to Coinbase/Tether/Stripe, like it's bad enough when there's another central bank on the other side, but a bunch of tech bros seems like a step too far.

> Why? They're already in a "hard to imagine world" (from your perspective) since they don't have control over their own currency, wouldn't it be "easier to imagine" that they move to a currency no one control?

This is not true, there's always someone in control. The notion of perfectly algorithmic currency is beloved of a lot of people, but what happens when this hits the legal system? Fundamentally either the service gets banned or the algorithm gets tweaked (which indicates that someone has control).

Many governments do not perform this function. The Eurozone is a shared currency standard and it's not like most Eurozone countries have a domestic currency and keep a liquid market of EUR <-> Domestic Currency to transact in the Eurozone. Their credits and debts are denominated in EUR.

Then there's countries that use other countries as legal tender, like El Salvador. There's countries that peg their currencies to other currencies like Gulf States to the USD and the CFA Franc Zone which pegs to the EUR.

So... there's plenty of world governments that do not control their own currencies.

> And more generally, if this is your plan, it's profoundly idiotic to say it in public before you've accomplished it, as you're giving your counterparties more time to adjust (which you probably don't want).

If you're going to call someone's plan idiotic it's best to get your own facts in order first. I mean this is the internet so you can say whatever you want and get internet points but some of us like to think in terms of facts.

I live in a Eurozone country, and while it's not ideal on balance it's been pretty good for us (except for all the bubbles caused by inappropriate interest rates). But it's been absolutely awful for Italy (who are large enough that they probably could support their own currency). And there's a strong argument that the real estate bubbles in the periphery of the Eurozone was driven by extra liquidity and interest rates tuned to get Germany out of it's slump.

But fundamentally the Eurozone is very very different from a stablecoin, particularly around governance and democratic control. To pretend that crypto is the same is pretty misleading. Who is the lender of last resort in crypto? Does anyone know? If you remember the GFC, this should worry you (at least it worries me).

> Then there's countries that use other countries as legal tender, like El Salvador.

How did that experiment with Bitcoin as legal tender go?

There's countries that peg their currencies to other currencies like Gulf States to the USD and the CFA Franc Zone which pegs to the EUR.

So the Gulf states are weird here, as they definitely have the cash to support their currency, but given that their major export is denominated in dollars it makes sense. Then again, I'm not particularly familiar with their economies, so the previous sentence is speculation (like all of this is).

The CFA franc zone is too small to support their own currency. Like, very few countries choose to peg to another currency unless they don't have enough hard assets to defend their currency. It's a least worst option kind of thing.

> > And more generally, if this is your plan, it's profoundly idiotic to say it in public before you've accomplished it, as you're giving your counterparties more time to adjust (which you probably don't want).

> If you're going to call someone's plan idiotic it's best to get your own facts in order first. I mean this is the internet so you can say whatever you want and get internet points but some of us like to think in terms of facts.

To be clear, I'm saying that the CEO of Coinbase was foolish to say this in a public forum. If I wanted to accomplish this, then I'd try to remain as quiet about it as possible while I was doing it, until it was too late to stop me. I think that's a strategic mistake on their part (assuming they want this happen). I'm definitely not calling you idiotic and apologise if that's what came across.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetary_sovereignty

I dont have financial/economic knowledge to argue my point to a full extent, but ive been under the assumption that p2p payments was only hard because various countries could not find a common ground, not only because of keeping control , but also getting laws changed/passed in most democratic nations is hard and might not be worth the scrutiny, entities in charge of their country banking system and regulations also find it difficult to bring radical ideas

There has been a handful of items that have bypassed all of this way before crypto and that is precious metals & gem stones like gold, silver, ruby, emerald etc you could be in the middle of africa and you will find someone who will easily buy your gold. Crypto is just like this and instead of mother nature dictating for us what material is rare , we as the consumers decide which crypto protocol, dapp, token ,blockchain etc to use and with competiton a better or improved system will always arise and trading gold hasnt eroded control for most nations, people still want hard cash for their day to day.