Money printing. Larger amounts loaned out every year devaluing all existing dollars. The number might be higher but it counts for less. Official inflation figures don’t even cover it since they don’t count things people actually try to use to store wealth.
Resenting Microsoft more than I hated Linux basically. When Windows started pushing malware-like popups and automatically “upgrading” peoples OS without asking I started using Linux as my main OS. At that point I disliked Linux because I had had some bad experiences with attempting to use it in the past, but it was becoming clear it is the lesser of two evils. Over the years it got more tolerable while Windows just got worse. Not an evangelist or obsessed at all, I actually still dislike it, but there’s no way I’m going back.
It’s valuable because barter economies aren’t real and don’t work. All the alternatives you mention are difficult to transport, not fungible, or not scarce, so they won’t work as a currency. Either we revert back to gift economies where distribution of goods happens within a community and follows cultural rather than economic rules, or the market settles on a currency for standardized arbitrary transactions between strangers that has the necessary properties of a currency.
What are the tradeoffs, assuming an email encryption scheme based on self custodied private keys and publicly published public keys? I don’t see any major disadvantages to using blockchain for this, and significant advantages. It’s a big deal if no one can selectively remove/conceal previously published info. If associating a key with an email, and someone is trying to impersonate you, you’ll know it, it’s not going to be hidden from you and specifically shown to someone else. It just makes sense to do it that way. Yes, you have to trust something at some point, but this is a way to minimize how much trust you have to give.
It’s an email that’s unrecoverable so not usable in many companies.
It doesn’t sound like you understand why someone would want to do email with public key cryptography, it sounds like rather you do not like the idea of doing email with public key cryptography. Being unrecoverable is just the tradeoff there. Again, what do you think the problem described even is? For reference,
The issue, Yen said, is ensuring that the public key actually belongs to the intended recipient. “Maybe it’s the NSA that has created a fake public key linked to you, and I’m somehow tricked into encrypting data with that public key,” he told Fortune. In the security space, the tactic is known as a “man-in-the-middle attack,” like a postal worker opening your bank statement to get your social security number and then resealing the envelope.
I think if you actually acknowledge the problem of trust for propagating public keys as a real one that is worth being solved, it would be hard to argue that blockchain is a bad fit for that problem, because it is not. Trustless, verifiable propagation of data is one of the things it actually offers unique benefits for.
I’m sure there are other reasons to not like the idea, but that’s what I can think off the top of my head.
It might be useful to start by considering the idea itself and what it is saying, instead of looking for arguments to make against it.
Wouldn’t you, in practice, basically need a lawyer to help make sure you “use” it correctly and legally?
Using private cryptocurrency is not illegal, at least in the United States, nor should it be. This is like worrying if it is legal to pay for things with cash.