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Comment by mattdesl | Hacker News Reader

All of these proposed alternatives are centrally owned either by a private company or state central bank, and only work in and between specific countries.

Crypto lies in stark contrast as a shared and open source protocol across the globe, that is not as easily centrally owned. Whether that is worth the pains of self custody, throughput and volatility is going to depend on who you ask.

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Rubbish, there's already big companies set up to re-centralise it. What wallet are you using.

You don't have to use a regular bank either you know, cash is way less traceable than Bitcoin.

> What wallet are you using.

There are hundreds of wallets, some of them OSS, some of them closed source, some of them homebrew. I have used several different wallets, including some that I have coded myself from lower level cryptographic APIs. This is the beauty of it: users are not limited to MetaMask, just like users are not limited to browsing the web in Chrome - despite it obviously having major market share.

And cash is a poor substitute.

Where do you live? Almost all of Africa, many parts of South-East Asia, India, many parts (if not all) of China, and nearly all of South America are heavily cash-based societies. Try to work your way up to Northern Burkina Faso, which has little to no electricity in most places, and your stance on cash being a poor substitute will quickly change.

The context of my original post is referring to transactions across the globe, for which cash is obviously a poor substitute.

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