We had an app store, so maybe a merchant would pay $5 monthly for an app that made their cash register double as a time clock. It was my team's job to slice that pie.
We keep $1, the bank that sold them the cash register gets $1, and the app developer gets $3. Or something.
But the merchants and the developers all live in various countries, so the "billing solutions" that we had to partner with in order to ensure that everybody gets their slice of the pie couldn't just accept "Give Joe $1" they had to know what the money was for so that they could justify the fees they were extracting from this pipe of money.
The smart way to do this would be to get all stakeholders to agree on a few hundred lines of code that would handle whatever regulatory needs they were on the hook for. That code would go in a smart contract and then we could use a blockchain as a single source of truth for the data.
Instead we had four companies all with their own separate, private databases, all attempting to reach consensus about what was owed to whom and why--usually based on out of date information from various channels.
What we needed were distributed systems engineers, and what we got was four stacks of middlemen and a directive to multiplex money between them. If they add a fifth stack of middlemen, the codebase will explode.
At least for me, once I saw one egregious inefficiency that would be solved by financial consensus algorithms I started seeing them everywhere.
Take wireless service for example. Why do we have several separate overlapping cell networks? Wouldn't it be better to have one big network and just pay the nearest network operator per-kilobyte? The only reason that doesn't work is that such a volume of USD payments would constitute more in fees than it did in payments.
----
Sorry for the rant. The point is that the way we do accounting in USD is so saturated by middlemen that it takes weeks for them to agree and allow money to move anywhere. During those weeks, the accounting complexity continues to increase.
Since our money moves so slowly, each company has to build at least two billing systems--one to handle the debts as they occur and another to move the money (usually monthly) to resolve the debts. But if the money can move as fast as the debts accrue, then you only need to build one billing system, and you don't have to pay an army of middlemen to badly approximate consensus.
It's not about the token itself, it's about the practices in place around that token. The people who occupy privileged positions in the ebb and flow of USD haven't had reason to change their ways for a very long time. The alternatives, on the other hand, are evolving rapidly.