Similarly, my joke is that bitcoin is an alien species or hostile AI's bloodless, costless, infinitely scalable weapon to get potential spacefaring competitors to abort themselves by subverting their star's energy to fruitless labor.
The government already mostly uses accounting instead of physical money so moving to a really expensive way of doing accounting probably wouldn't save money.
I think they were trying to intimate that a large-scale adopted cryptocurrency could replace large swaths of financial infrastructure (this is a sort of pie-in-the-sky ideal, but something like it could happen) - picture a cryptocurrency replacing the federal reserve, VISA, the european central bank, brick-and-mortar bank branches and credit unions (partially), etc. It couldn't replace everything, and new things would become necessary, but I think there is potential (even if small) for it to provide enormous value at least on the order of its energy consumption.
Traditional ways of doing all those things are faster and cheaper than blockchain.
Transaction clearing between banks isn't particularly fast, but that's because of legacy legal issues more than it is anything technological. The actual transfer of large sums can happen very quickly.
"If everyone agreed with me, there'd be no disagreement!"
Most of the things that crypto proponents tout as features (transaction irreverisibility, lack of inflation, etc.) are in fact bugs, and they just don't realize it because they don't realize how finance and economics actually work.
Tapping your watch and wondering "why isn't everyone using crypto already??" is never going to yield useful results, so you do actually need to address these issues.
>Most of the things that crypto proponents tout as features (transaction irreverisibility, lack of inflation, etc.) are in fact bugs, and they just don't realize it because they don't realize how finance and economics actually work.
These are not inherent features of cryptocurrencies, there are cryptos with reversible transactions and inflation.
> (transaction irreverisibility, lack of inflation, etc.) are in fact bugs
They weren't bugs for the thousands of years when gold was used.
> they don't realize how finance and economics actually work.
You probably mean the last 40 years of finance and economics, since our modern monetary system has really only been around since Nixon took the US off the gold standard after the US over spent due to the Vietnam war and Charles de Gaulle started to exchange his dollars for the quoted rates of gold.
Transactions with physical currency are reversible, just not easily so. And solid gold was rarely used as a day to day currency, so you would have an amalgam which was subject to inflation as the government either changed how much gold backed it, or phsycially reduced the amount of gold in the coin.
For thousands of years people used actual gold, especially countries moving money back and forth between them.
Inflation in its current form didn't really exist. The exchange rate for gold of a country's currency didn't change much, if at all. The dollar went from $20 per ounce, to $35 per ounce during FDR, then lost the vast majority of its value, getting us to over $1,300 per ounce that we have now.
Physical money requires the person giving it back physically. Crypto currencies have a chain of transactions, you can just send the balance back to one of the addresses it was sent from. There isn't much difference there.
