Brett Scott

For a long time the crypto space has been pointing out, "if you think crypto should be illegal, you must not understand what cash is like." In other words, far more illegal activity is facilitated through cash than crypto. Unfortunately, it looks that rather than the world moving in the direction of embracing both, things are sliding towards rejecting both.

I came into this book knowing a bit about the downsides of centralized digital payment technologies, but have come out the other side a full-on cash evangelist.

Scott is a great writer. The book is full of interesting stories.

Scott points out: if you're concerned about fraud, traditional banks are, by far, the largest facilitators of financial fraud; cash and crypto don't come anywhere close. What about Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)? One challenge there is that essentially all business loans are made by private banks, so moving away towards CBDC could bankrupt the economy.

As decades of cyberattacks have made clear: when you create massive, centralized, automated systems, you're enables massive fraud. Cash exploits aren't scaleable, so damage is always limited. As the Chinese Communist Party's centralization of digital payments illustrates, when a centralized institution controls individual payments, entire classes of people can be removed from the economy with a click of a button, facilitating chilling "Black Mirror" reenactments.

It turns out that cash isn't broken. If you're looking for something to fix, maybe try digital payments. Unfortunately, the fight is asymmetrical against cash; there are massive industries aligned against cash, and no big interests that are pro cash.… (altro)