It's all in Timothy May's email signature from the cypherpunks mailing list:
Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
knowledge, reputations, information markets,
black markets, collapse of governments.
The key concept is: sovereignty. In the end, this will reshape the nation state.
Expecting the nation state to just sit there and watch seems naive. When it becomes a big enough threat to make them notice, the nation state will regulate it stone dead.
I doubt it, because it's global. The frog will heat slowly enough that it won't notice until it becomes necessary for global competitiveness—and for the United States, ongoing dominance. It will also be a game of whack-a-mole. We're only 10 years in. In another 10 years, many things we can't imagine now will happen.
But we shall see!
Another possibility is that current cryptos are regulated and more state-compliant ones emerge (see: China).
A journalist that went to El Salvador and tried to use BTC to pay begs to differ:
> By Friday the final tally looks grim for crypto fans. Only 10 of almost 50 businesses had taken Bitcoin, amounting to $485 out of $1,700 I’ve spent. And only four crypto transactions—at the pool hall, the peanut vendor, a Starbucks, and a Caterpillar-brand T-shirt store—had been entirely seamless. My experience isn’t a fluke. In a recent Chamber of Commerce survey of 337 businesses, only 14% said they’d transacted in Bitcoin since September.
