> for 99.99% of people the banking layer and bureaucracy of modern monetary systems is a feature that protects them from fraudulent transactions, people stealing their credit card number, and businesses charging them and not delivering goods. These are generally good things.

Let's go through these. To begin with, "fraudulent transactions" is redundant because that's either someone stealing your credit card number or someone you paid not doing what they said. So let's consider those two:

> people stealing their credit card number

This is the problem caused by the existing system, which is designed with such poor security that breaching a merchant allows the attackers to make charges to their innocent customers' cards at a different merchant. They get zero credit for providing a mitigation to the problem they created themselves.

> businesses charging them and not delivering goods

This gets sold as a benefit, but it's also a cost, because then it becomes a mechanism to commit fraud. People go to a business that does deliver the goods and issue a fraudulent chargeback. The merchants then have to pass the cost of that onto everyone else, which means that it's also a fraud against every other customer.

Meanwhile we have other solutions to that problem that don't do that. Established businesses don't want to ruin their reputation. If someone rips you off you can sue them. Sometimes you're just paying someone for something they're already delivered.

And most importantly, there instances when you would trust someone to deliver the goods independent of the payment system, and other instances when you wouldn't. Which is why you want both payment systems to be available instead of just the second one, so you don't have to pay for the chargeback fraud when you don't need to buy your trust from the payment system.

Very similar arguments were made for slavery. Giving up freedom for a promise of safety rarely the right choice.

While it is possible for the state to inflict violence, it's relatively difficult to scale. The state can freeze your USD accounts with the stroke of a key (as they did for Russian accounts recently). Whereas rounding up and torturing all those account-holders is just obviously infeasible.

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Is it necessarily the case that it isn't? Suppose you can't afford health insurance and you have a condition for which a controlled substance would be prescribed, if you had access to the healthcare system, but you don't. If you then buy it over the internet, is the system being wronged by you or are you being wronged by the system?

The war on drugs is a scam. Cocaine prohibition is a pretext to oppress indigenous peoples of the Andes. https://filtermag.org/world-health-organization-coca-prohibi...

So why don't any businesses let me Fedwire them money? It turns out unlike the physical version of cash, this "digital version" has hefty transaction fees and a poor UI meaning no business will take it, unlike how almost all physical businesses will take cash.

> the banks can ask for it in cash if need be

Ehhh, can they? I suspect any bank that tried would pretty soon find that it actually couldn't.

The decentralized nature of banks makes it hard to offer a good payment experience to consumers and businesses.