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> Payment providers also discriminate against certain aspects of society, such as sex work. The fees an adult content provider needs to pay are astronomical if they can even get a contract with any payment provider at all. Furthermore, the USA has a severe problem that stems from companies like Equifax deciding what you can and cannot afford with no way to protest their decisions.

This is not a technology problem, this is a legal problem. To change it, we need to change the laws, not the technology. Sure, they can use crypto now to skirt those regulations, but clearly crypto payments will be regulated exactly as fiat payments very soon. Then, you're back at square one but have burned the planet and enabled ransomware and scammers along the way.

If crypto's main use case is to skirt common agreed upon societal rules that might be debatable, imagine it can be used extensively for all causes that are not up for debate - for ex financing terrorism

It's hardly a legal problem, there are plenty of countries and US states where many kinds of sex work are perfectly legal, and having your life ruled by credit agencies is far from universal.

I understand that with decent regulation illegal goods can't just fly under the radar anymore, I'm just saying that in the current ecosystem there is a use case for this fake money where real money simply cannot be exchanged reliably. In an ideal world we wouldn't need fake underground value transfers but the world is far from ideal.

> It's hardly a legal problem, there are plenty of countries and US states where many kinds of sex work are perfectly legal

How is it not a legal problem, when it's apparently possible to solve it entirely by having a different legislation?

Generally you need to change legislation in a country that you do not have citizenship in.

Cryptocurrencies are terrible at privacy, too. Any time you try to use cryptocurrency to buy physical goods (or fiat currency), whoever you're transacting with can know every transaction you've ever made.

Don't generalise. Monero can do that just fine.

Just ban crypto advertising. That way people who actually need crypto for whatever reason can use it, and Matt Damon can't convince your aunt to throw away her inheritance into some shitcoin

At the very least, crypto advertising should be regulated like gambling ads, not like finacial investment ads.

This is applying technical solutions to social issues. Nothing technically prevents credit card or other online payment means from being anonymous, there are implemented that way for social reasons.

This is also where I see the cryptocurrencies going: regulatory bodies putting more and more resources and restrictions to align them with other monetary systems, to a point where them being based on blockchain will just be an implementation detail.

> There have been plenty of times that I didn't want to hand over my name and address for an online purchase, but the traditional payment systems aren't set up for privacy.

Private payments can easily solved without a blockchain. For private payments you don't need a completely trust-less system. Taler[1] solves this quite elegantly: they provide completetly anonymous payments for the customer but still require the merchant to be 'on-record' to make money laundering harder/impossible. For that they rely on a regulated and trusted party as you would with a regular payment provider or bank. No proof of work needed, no value volatility, just an online representation of cash with accountability for the merchant built-in.

Of course, this also means that your second point is still valid for Taler: The involved trusted parties could collectively decide that they want to discriminate against certain merchants, in the same way the current payment providers did.

[1]: https://taler.net/en/