I wonder if some of the non-robustness of the tradfi system is a feature, not a bug. If my account tries to send someone $3 million, I'd prefer that it's intermediated by a confused bank employee staring at a screen rather than a beautifully efficient, irreversible machine consensus. The bottlenecks and intermediaries create friction, sure, but that isn't per se bad.

My hang-up with crypto is that it solves the ledger-keeping part of running a financial system, but it isn't clear that's actually the hard part! Preventing and remediating fraud, money laundering, etc. are, and crypto makes those issues worse, not better.

> If my account tries to send someone $3 million, I'd prefer that it's intermediated by a confused bank employee staring at a screen

This is a nice lens for looking at when stablecoins make sense.

If you're an American using your Chase account to buy coffee at Starbucks, the permissioned, heuristically fraud-checked, slow-settling tradfi system is well optimized for you.

If you are an importer buying $3m worth of bulk coffee from Kenya, you would much rather have an instant 1:1 USD transfer on beautifully efficient machine consensus.

In many countries in the world, the banking system is extractive and unreliable. The "confused employee" is not there to help you. The two weeks of money in transit is no benefit, just a source of additional counterparty risk, cost, and delay.

An immutable and transparent ledger is not for everything but it is a useful primitive.