> If there is one single thing I would absolutely give to crypto (in its essential form, not through centralized, heavily regulated intermediaries like Coinbase

> If there is one single thing I would absolutely give to crypto (in its essential form, not through centralized, heavily regulated intermediaries like Coinbase) it's that something like the above and the many stories in this comment thread can be circumvented if one is relatively careful about managing transfers, keys and basic use. That’s a very big “if” Cryptocurrency trades one set of problems for another set of problems. If you’ve ever seen the analytics for password reset at a large website (general, non-tech audience) and looked at the support statistics for account lockout help requests, you’d see why self-managed crypto is infeasible for any general market operations Tech people look at their own usage patterns and see that they can manage passwords and private keys just fine, but the same is not true for the general population. It’s not even close. Crypto also lacks one of the big selling points of credit cards and PayPal: Disputed transactions. Disputes are terrible when misused by lying customers, but disputes have also saved me from some sellers who never shipped the items I bought. With crypto, my money would be gone forever. Other scammers would see that there was no recourse and would start running more scams. Buyers would notice that crypto transactions have higher risk and would lower their purchase price tolerance. Sellers would notice and would offer alternate services at higher prices. And we’d be back to everyone using PayPal and similar services.