If a geopolitical climate is too volatile for fiat to provide value, what good is it that crypto can isolate its stability (it can’t) if the humans who would use it have bigger problems than how to pay with money they already have in some form? Supply chains, physical force/warfare, climate, etc. If fiat is breaking down, there are surely bigger problems at play. How does solving the ability to transfer money solve the overall stability of the situation?

Per your example, ok Apple Pay got cut off. Is the transit system going to support crypto? Will they be able to run their business and make that transition with regulators? It’s a drastic measure that cuts one off from the structures that they physically exist in, and unless those structures are overall crypto-supportive, they would just be putting themselves further between a rock and hard place (which as we’ve seen by the lack of serious business adoption, companies and orgs are not really willing to take that risk in any meaningful way)

Edit: I agree with your use of the term “regime” and am not arguing against the sentiment of your point. Just that I don’t think crypto actually has the backbone to solve it, there’s not enough physical-world tie in yet for it to have the leverage it needs to truly overcome the global financial regimes that are neck-deep in fiat and physical assets that actually impact everyday peoples’ lives.

>>Per your example, ok Apple Pay got cut off. Is the transit system going to support crypto? Will they be able to run their business and make that transition with regulators?

That's the big question. But assuming for a moment that crypto can act as a substitute for traditional centralized payment systems, then it has significant advantages in some contexts over those systems.

> But assuming for a moment that crypto can act as a substitute for traditional centralized payment systems, then it has significant advantages in some contexts over those systems.

Except that, fundamentally, distributed permission-less systems can't come close to the computational efficiency of centralized systems. So this is like "assuming perpetual motion machines existed, we could build a post-scarcity society" levels of assumption.

I don't think that is established. Distributed and permissionless systems don't need to handle the overhead of access control. They do have the computational overhead of massive redundancy, but that can be significantly reduced with zk-(SNARK/STARK) cryptography that provides succinct zero-knowledge proofs of validity.

With zk-proofs, the redundancy of a blockchain can be significantly reduced without comprimising security. What redundancy remains provides the high process integrity that critical applications like financial transactions require.

Do you have any recommended readings on zk-proofs? Familiar with crypto, familiar with zcash, but haven’t looked into this enough and sounds promising. I am going to look into it.

It’s been around for a bit already, why is it not more widely adopted compared to BTC/ETH, any thoughts?

This is a good write-up on how zk-proofs can be used to increase the scalability of blockchains:

https://polynya.medium.com/rollups-data-availability-layers-...

zcash initially used zk-proofs only for privacy. It is only now looking to utilize it for scalability.