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It took many thousands of years to switch from gold/silver money to paper (fiat) money. It was tried many times and failed each time until the US succeeded in the 20th century. Even that final transition took 38 years to complete from 1933-1971 despite the US having the power of both nuclear weapons and the world's reserve currency after 1945.

The transition from paper fiat dollars to electronic (credit/debit cards and later NFC apps) for ordinary everyday payments which began in ernest ~1990* is still not complete (30+ years). This is despite the fact that it is only a different method of payment, not a change in monetary system like gold/silver -> fiat was.

Why would anyone expect a transition from fiat (paper and/or electronic) money to crypto to only take 10 years?

* one of the places I worked in high school in 1988 was People's Drug (CVS). While we did have the primitive early electronic swipe terminals for credit cards, they were only used by the cashier for pre-authorizations (replacing the earlier method of calling an 800 number). The pre-auth step could take several minutes. We then had to imprint the card on carbon paper vouchers with the mechanical "click-clack" machines and write down various information on the vouchers with ballpoint pens. Fortunately very few customers used credit cards due to this long tedious process. Payment by check wasn't much faster as we had to write down driver's license number and address on the check by hand.

In 1990 or so the first gas stations started to accept payments at the pump. Before that you had to walk inside and pay with paper money or the old slow mechanical credit card method or checks. For the first few years they only accepted debit cards at the pump, not credit. A few grocery stores started accepting debit cards around the same time as the gas stations.




If this comment means "the current transition to crypto is likely to fail" then we agree.


Many central banks including the Fed are looking into CBDC's. While not quite the same as the distributed consensus based algorithm of Bitcoin, there are too many benefits to governments/central banks to ignore the technology.

The question is not whether cryptographically secured algorithmic money will be a part of future monetary systems but who will control the algorithm and/or how will different systems compete with each other.




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