@BertG There is a few huge differences between bitcoin and most centralized currency–the main one is centralization. Bitcoin is not centralized, and is controled by it’s founders more than anyone–not a government. That’s a huge difference.
Another massive difference is that cryptos either use a lot more, or a lot less energy than centralized currency. Bitcoin uses far, far, far more. Ripple uses less, but is centralized by banks. Whats likely to happen imo is that crypto gets regulated out of existence for the most part, but certain ledgers and blockchains will stick around for banks and other large institutions to use.
People absolutely abuse money… Just look at American tax law…
@ben
For most of our evolution we didn’t have money, and no, we weren’t really fighting for our survival either–we survived as hunter gatherers on this planet far longer than we didn’t. A lot longer, like a few hundred thousand years, versus the last ten or twenty. We’re actually pretty well adapted to be hunter gatherers, and pretty poorly adapted for what we are doing now, biologically speaking anyway…
Anywhoo, barter–which led to money–got introduced something like ten thousand years ago, after we stopped being hunter gatherer’s, and started doing agriculture. This is also when patriarchy, war, hoarding, the concept of an “other”, government in the form of kings and queens, got introduced. Before that we were living in primitive communism, which wasn’t so bad, but not so great either. This is according to the first chapter or two of A People’s History of the World anyway…
This isn’t to say money is evil, or that we shouldn’t have split from that lifestyle. More that by examining how we did live peacefully with each other for so long, that maybe we could recreate such a society today, but with modern tech and so on. Essentially, we should work towards startrek…
Oh, and a caveat, for a lot of that time we were all happily hunting and gathering, one could argue part of the reason we didn’t fight each other is we were busy killing off the Neanderthals…