> Sending money across "borders" is hard only because governments made it so
On the contrary, it's much easier than it has ever been in human history to send money across borders, mostly due to government regulation of international finance.
For the absurdly wealthy, such regulation is a major pain of course. But the thing about the absurdly wealthy is... they can afford to deal with major pains.
For the rest of the human race, the real question to ask about these non-governmental currencies is: would you rather have your money be regulated by your local government and the governments of those you wish to trade with, or would you rather have your money be regulated by Facebook? I find this a very easy question to answer, personally.
> would you rather have your money be regulated by your local government and the governments of those you wish to trade with, or would you rather have your money be regulated by Facebook?
This is a false dichotomy: blockchain tech makes it clear that a third possibility is emerging - one which relies on no central authority at all, be it state or corporate.
The third option, despite not having a "central authority" seems to have been widely hijacked.
What we know about economics seems to fly in the face of design decisions repeated again and again by cryptocurrency originators.
The popularity of deflationary economics (maximum coin counts, diminishing mining rewards) incentivizes economic rictus-- eternal hoarding and austerity-- when basically every central bank on Earth recognizes that a modest, predictable inflation rate helps to spur consumer demand and actual economic activity. This is not some conspiracy to undermine your gold sovereigns and silver dollars, it's a century of data in action.
Then you've got the tendency to stick to unsavoury communities. While some of this may be because they're the funding method of last resort for businesses that can't touch conventional payment systems (criminal or just radioactively controversial), there does seem to be an active prioritization of privacy, unreversibility, and immunity from regulation features, over features non-enthusiast consumers want like "easy cashin/out to fiat" and "fraud protection".
If you said "here's a shiny happy new tech product. It's not designed as a treatise on the gold standard, to spar with governments, or create some speculative investment. It's just about using 21st century technology to undercut the high margins of Visa, Mastercard, and Western Union", that would hit real needs. But it would be 1) hard to bootstrap because there would be no philosophically or investment motivated enthusiasts to evangelize for it and 2) likely very different in structure and operation than today's cryptocurrency products. It might not even be a blockchain-crypto product, and it might even be outright ran by a state agency.
On the contrary, it's much easier than it has ever been in human history to send money across borders, mostly due to government regulation of international finance.
For the absurdly wealthy, such regulation is a major pain of course. But the thing about the absurdly wealthy is... they can afford to deal with major pains.
For the rest of the human race, the real question to ask about these non-governmental currencies is: would you rather have your money be regulated by your local government and the governments of those you wish to trade with, or would you rather have your money be regulated by Facebook? I find this a very easy question to answer, personally.