@russ_watters :
The thing I dislike about the "system" is how it always gets heavier with time and I don't feel it solves that many problems; at least not without creating new ones.
When I was younger, I used to pay cash a lot, and I resisted using all forms of card payment (credit or debit) as much as I could. It was so simple. Withdrawing money from your bank account was free, even though you were served by a real person. Now we got machines doing it for us. We have to tell them what to do and it is our fault if we put the wrong input; It was never a problem with a real person. Machines were supposed to cost less to operate, but we now have monthly fees and lower interest rates on our bank account. How is that possible? Well, a lot of security, insurances, and services I didn't use to have but are now required. Not to mention that you have to constantly monitor which package best suits your spending habits, and these packages change often.
I want to buy a pack of gum, I need to share a piece of my identity, given to me by someone else (bank, credit card, etc.). I worry less about someone stealing my cash, but I now worry about people stealing my identity or following me everywhere I go for ... I'm not sure what reason. If I have good insurance from the provider against identity theft, I worry less, but that means that they reimburse every victim easily and/or set heavy security which means higher fees overall or it is more cumbersome to use the services. I can pay cash, but now every payment system or store uses some reward system that gives you back around 1% on everything you buy. If you don't use their systems, then you pay 1% more - plus the cost of managing the system - for everything you buy (included in the vendor's price) and you never get it back. These systems also change all the time.
We used to have 1000 $ bills in Canada. They removed it for reducing money laundering. The same goes for imposing limits on cash withdrawals without justifications Do the bad guys have really slowed down the money laundering operations since then? No, it just makes it more complicated for the common man to use cash.
I can say the same about paying sales taxes. It gets more and more complicated for the merchant, and the extra work must be reflected in the final price somehow. All of this is because the government doesn't want to send the big bill directly to the taxpayer or wants to exert control over what people do.
Is all of this giving us a fairer and more secure society? I don't really feel the difference. It is just annoying and creates useless bureaucracy, which is a waste of time & resources.
Cryptocurrency is (should be?) cash for the cyber era, with all the same advantages and disadvantages, and I would like to have the choice of using it if I wish to. And there is no way someone will make me believe that there were more crimes when everything was done with cash; that regulations have solved all of the injustices of the past, and this at no cost; and that deregulating will bring more chaos than we have right now (since not much have changed; the problems just move around).
But that is just my 2¢.