Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know of any other way to send electronic cash with no intermediaries (EDIT: financial institutions)? It's the first sentence of the whitepaper and ignored by 99% of people, including highly paid software developers. Whether or not you need that will depend on where the world goes. A CDBC social-credit system world presents a lot of incentives to use something else. And if you do need it, you need it ahead of t…
It is ignored because for the vast majority of customers, the intermediary is not a problem. In fact, the intermediary is usually an asset. I know when I buy something with my credit card or PayPal, that payment processor has me covered if the seller tries to screw me over. The people who hate the intermediaries are the sellers, because they don't like losing a small % of their sale to a payment processor. But seller…
In general this is just an illustration of the racket between banks and card companies, since customers really only seek to pay using the payment options their bank provides upon opening an account, although I guess that's not a surprise given Visa started out under Bank of America[0].
If banks provided a crypto wallet that had all the benefits of regular accounts like direct deposit and FDIC insurance, which they might eventually do[1], I doubt many would hesitate to use it. The only barrier would be if using the crypto wallet presented a fee that Visa and the rest of the card industry loves to keep a secret by charging the merchant instead, with the merchant passing on those costs to the customer in the form of higher MSRPs.
0: https://minesafetydisclosures.com/blog/2019/5/29/part-l-a-hi...
1: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/what-is-a-central-bank-d...