Earlier quoted context omitted.
What use is a currency (or commodity!) that you can't convert into a good or service? It seems like a fundamental problem if the theoretical advantages of a currency are lost the instant you try to use it to buy something. Otherwise we're just wasting gigawatts of electricity to print Monopoly money.
The assumption has always been that cryptocurrency driven markets would emerge completely decoupled from states and their systems of financial regulation, and so conversion would be neither necessary, nor desired. Everything you could possibly want to buy, legal or illegal, would be payable through the crypto market. Cryptocurrencies were supposed to undermine fiat, or at least render it unnecessary, barring taxes, n…
Not to mention it would never work, the blockchain has way too much overhead (many many orders of magnitude) to support an entire world's worth of exchanges every day. There literally isn't enough electricity in the world. People would have to do all of their transfers on third party exchanges that undermine all of the crypto guarantees of the currency in the first place. They're no better than putting your fiat currency in a bank run by criminals that have no respect for laws. And I'm not talking euphemistically about regular bankers here, I'm talking about full up scam artists. I mean why not, it's not like the law is going to get you. There are no pesky regulations to get in the way. No annoying insurance adjusters breathing down your neck. You have total freedom to scam everybody all day long.