Stellar is built to be a bridge from the physical one to the digital one. There certainly are tradeoffs there, particularly that the kinds of trust relationship

Stellar is built to be a bridge from the physical one to the digital one. There certainly are tradeoffs there, particularly that the kinds of trust relationships needed for your life today have direct analogues. But, as I mentioned in https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective, it's not obvious that the Bitcoin technology on its own will end up being enough to avoid having to reintroduce trust in some form. (There is a chance that we'll figure out how to do trust in a distributed fashion, which would be awesome for both Bitcoin and Stellar.) So I'm with you — there are real tradeoffs here, and I'd encourage everyone interested in this stuff to mull them over (and I'm also happy to discuss: gdb@stripe.com). But one thing I really respect about the Stellar organization is the very deliberate approach they've taken to these choices, and how they've found a happy middle that feels like a translation of the existing physical world into the new digital one. If it works, I think it'll make Bitcoin and other digital currencies even more successful.