But a key difference is that nobody is forced to use a specific cryptocurrency and it's much easier to see if your cryptocurrency is being manipulated.
If a currency isn't working for you; you should be able to choose a different one which does.
As an investor, it would make things more interesting because you will no longer be able to just sit around and wait for the capital to come to you through the same reliable fiat channels (e.g. interest, corporate dividends, index funds, ...); you will have to keep moving your investments across cryptocurrencies to follow the value and talent.
If any specific cryptocurrency becomes unfair, smart people will dump it for another one; the manipulated coin will lose its value.
There are crooks in every country and it's not fair that you should be forced to share a currency with them just because you live in a country which happens to have a lot of them.
> If a currency isn't working for you; you should be able to choose a different one which does.
Imagine an employer saying "This week I'm paying you by dollars, but I don't like being forced to deal with dollars, so if I decide dollars aren't working for us we'll switch to Euros next month. And then maybe Pound the month after that."
I'm not sure how this is going to benefit cryptocurrency users.
If conversion is easy and fast, then I wouldn't care what my employer pays me with. The onus is on me to figure out which currency is used by the smartest and most productive people on the planet because that's the one I want to hold onto in the long term.
It's not exactly the world's biggest secret that the smartest and most productive people on the planet do their business in USD or other local currencies...
And the average person is even more keen on being paid in something they can reliably exchange goods for or invest in productive businesses whose value rises when they make more profit rather than the money-printing scheme du jour whose future value rises are contingent on hype and exchange manipulation.
>it's much easier to see if your cryptocurrency is being manipulated.
Specific transactions can be verified but that does not translate in to full transparency. Transactions can be obfuscated and laundered. A Swiss bank could set up a wallet to perform all BTC transactions through.
And your not being forced to use fiat. If you were, investing in crypto wouldn't even be possible.
As an investor, it would make things more interesting because you will no longer be able to just sit around and wait for the capital to come to you through the same reliable fiat channels (e.g. interest, corporate dividends, index funds, ...); you will have to keep moving your investments across cryptocurrencies to follow the value and talent.
If any specific cryptocurrency becomes unfair, smart people will dump it for another one; the manipulated coin will lose its value.
There are crooks in every country and it's not fair that you should be forced to share a currency with them just because you live in a country which happens to have a lot of them.