Comment by ToucanLoucan

I have no doubt that at least some especially in the early days envisioned crypto as a legitimate alternative to fiat currency. That being said, in it's mature state as a technology, it amounts to nothing more than a clone of the modern financial system with a different set of oligarchs, except that it has far fewer consumer protections, and the nature of it makes implementing said protections in any way extremely difficult.

That combined with the extreme volatility of value that is not only endemic to any coin with meaningful usage, but is generally a goal of most coins, makes it only really useful as a speculative vehicle, and those same properties also make it uniquely bad in terms of a store of value to be used in commerce unless the seller also plans to speculate on the value.

And, even if you're good with all of that: Yes, the tech itself is decentralized, but if you don't have at least some background in basic software development or scripting, you're almost certainly going to end up using some product or another to manage your wallets and transactions, and while the wallet is anonymous, the accounts you connect the wallet to are often quite the opposite, and because of the structure of the chains, your entire transaction history is visible to everyone on the network, at all times. So it's private by default, but basically any casual user is immediately and forever doxxable.