I attended the first HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) 1994 and heard a panel speak that included Eric Hughes, famous for the Cypherpunk's Manifesto among other th

I attended the first HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) 1994 and heard a panel speak that included Eric Hughes, famous for the Cypherpunk's Manifesto among other things, about cryptography, banking, cypherpunk, etc. This was 15 years before the blockchain paper by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 and the start of Bitcoin on the market in 2009. The dream was to have anonymity and privacy for everyone. It would also eliminate the middle man. When you buy a late at Starbucks, it goes through at least 4 or 5 agencies, and they all take a cut, and track your information. Due to typical scare tactics, "drug dealers and pedophiles will use it to avoid prosecution", like cash was never used anonymously for drug deals! Also a few bad players in the crypto market didn't help with the reputation. However, to totally cave and move to centralized government control of your wallet is insane. Yes, you already have a lot of that with ATMs, debit cards, credit cards, Paypal, Apple and Google, but now you are going to put it all in one basket? It's bad enough paper money is now just a joke without a gold-backed or other real world commodity, just print as much as you can to keep the average joe/jane in the dark about how bad the value of the currency really is. Europe is going to crash hard economically for many reasons in the coming years, and this will give the government the power to control the populace even more when it does.