A lot of these issues come down to trade-offs. For instance, there is the potential for criminals to use e-cash to do crime, just as they use physical cash. B

A lot of these issues come down to trade-offs. For instance, there is the potential for criminals to use e-cash to do crime, just as they use physical cash. But the flip-side of that is the cash empowers individuals and serves as a guard against encroachments of their liberty. Cryptocurrency allowed people to donate to Wikileaks when the financial blockade was imposed on it. It's not hard to imagine a future where blockchains are far more scalable, and large numbers of people who are discriminated against by the banking system rely on it for economic integration. Individuals and organisations on the fringes like Wikileaks are important guarantors against centralized tyranny. Without a payment system outside the control of centralized authorities they can be more easily snuffed out. In other words, cash is an important institution, and arguably the price of criminals having an easier time getting away with crime as a result of its existence is worth paying, to avoid a future where the only financial system is the one subject to anti-money-laundering-laws, and thus subject to warrantless mass-surveillance system over all private financial transactions. Perhaps someone on the inside of the political system their whole adult life, like the article's author, can't really empathize with this view point that we should distrust the political elite and its governing structures, but perhaps he can see the danger of not having a healthy apolitical form of finance in a future dominated by a government like China's. As for the argument that the centralized financial system provides stability and market integrity, it's not clear that this is true. The US had a free-ish banking system in the 19th century, but it was made more fragile than it would have been under a free market by 1. Civil War era banking regulations that required banks to hold US bonds as reserves and 2. laws against interstate branching. The former resulted in an unstable centralized money supply that fluctuated with the volume of outstanding US bonds and the latter prevented more diversified banks from emerging that could better weather localised shocks. Canada had neither of these mandates and consequently had a far more stable banking system. There were proposals before the Fed was created to make the US financial sector more like Canada's, but the banking cartelists won the argument, and the Federal Reserve mandates were passed to cartelize the banking sector under a centralized hierarchy. A couple of good talks by George Selgin on pre-Fed era and the 100 year performance record of the Fed: https://youtu.be/Z0J_Ai2sSmY https://youtu.be/Z0J_Ai2sSmY https://youtu.be/P0E7I4URW5o https://youtu.be/P0E7I4URW5o