I would say this its biggest advantage. It doesn't have to be a controversial or fraudulent transaction. Regular digital money ownership and exchange, especially across countries, is severely policed and most of the time impossible for a huge portion of the population, not because they're criminals, but because they happen to be living in or coming from a place where these freedoms are just not there. Cryptocurrencies take away these and numerous other problems that are caused by ordinary financial institutions and the way societies are structured.
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Agreed. The tech is there, but gatekeepers have set up shop around the last mile. Onerous regulations like KYC surround exchanges in the first world. In regions with tight capital controls, it can be even more difficult. The people who stand to benefit the most have the biggest hurdles to adoption.
Exchanges are not a part of Bitcoin, and should not exist. Not your keys, not your money.
KYC is an invention by financial systems that have nothing to do with Bitcoin and it's intended use. Nobody holds custody over Bitcoin but the privatekey owner. KYC/AML are scams. They do not exist within Bitcoin. This is simply speculators adhering to a financial system that does not control them. There is absolutely no need at all to ever adhere to KYC/AML as they exist in traditional banking, and not in Bitcoin. Folks that don't understand how to use Bitcoin outside of that traditional system for some reason are constantly pining for regulation. This is anti-Bitcoin.
KYC and AML exist for a reason - investigating and stopping massive amounts of financial crime.
People want to convert between fiat currency and BTC, that’s why they end up interacting with these regulations.
You can’t currently live only using BTC, but even if you could, the public ledger of every transaction would make it pretty easy to figure out your scheme and come after you anyway whenever you tried to convert the money to actually do anything.
BTC is a poor candidate for day to day transactions. I'm not sure it can ever reach that level of adoption under the current conditions. Lightning network has been a Rube Goldberg machine of complications.
There are other altcoins like NANO which are a better fit for actual transactions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVNyr4Q3jq4
Agree that there's no way to reach a 100% homogeneous cryptocurrency economy and that exchanges are necessary. As an example, taxes are always paid/priced in the state's currency. Even if we could reach that point, I doubt it could be done by an entire economy switching their billing over to BTC overnight. Exchanges facilitate adoption.