You don’t have to trust a bank or some company. Nobody can deny you access to your money or prevent you from using it. It’s not something you make use of, it’s just a property of cryptocurrency.

Nope, you just have to make sure that you don’t accidentally get swindled or defrauded online (often in ways that aren’t possible with, you know, a normal bank account or a wallet with some money in it). Also, I don’t have to trust the bank to keep my deposits. The FDIC exists. Frozen assets and bank accounts aren’t something I concern myself with daily as a normal person who isn’t running a money laundering, mail fraud, or other type of crime ring.

EDIT: I also left out here that you also have to make sure to remember your password / passphrase information so that you won’t lock yourself out, as many people have already done and will continue to do because there’s no really good way for most people to store this information.

But using the currency still doesn’t require trust. You are wrong though, since there are decentralized exchanges too and they don’t require trust. I’ve already told about Bisq. Other ways of getting cryptocurrency are buying it from an ATM (done that) or accepting it as payment for your work (this is rare, but I’ve heard of it).

How do you convert USD to one of your crappy coins with a decentralized, trust-less exchange? I get how you can transfer around between cryptocurrencies (though I have no idea why you’d want to) once you’re inside of crypto, but how about when you are holding actual money?

Never mind, you just do it through a cEnTRaLiZEd service (that already has your banking information…see step #3 of “getting started”): https://bisq.network/getting-started/

Wow, I can really see the usefulness of this “feature”. Also, how does that ATM to bitcoin conversion happen, pray tell? Through magical pixie dust, or through a series of services provided to ATM vendors, which almost certainly comply with existing banking laws?

Cryptocurrency or any other technology is not an indecipherable mess.

The tech sucks (blockchain is more of an albatross than a gift given from the heavens that crypto fellaters seem to think it is), but more than that the rhetoric and philosophy around it is an indecipherable mess. It’s buzzword soup, full of people who are trying to “invest” in a currency when that’s not what you’d ever do with a currency in the first place. Payment systems and currency aren’t the same thing…except in crypto because everything is a knotted mess and it’s a Ponzi scheme masquerading as some leap forward in tech…a solution looking for a problem.

There is nothing that can let you figure out someone’s transactions with 100% certainty. Governments could try this and they might be able to track some targeted individuals, but not everyone. This is better privacy than any other payment option provides. There is a whole video series about Monero’s security, but I haven’t watched it yet: https://youtu.be/WOyC6OB6ezA

Again, cash exists which offers much better privacy protection than Monero. If I want privacy in transactions I’m going cash 10 times out of 10. The security of Monero is again a tack-on because it cannot change the way that crypto works generally (a huge ledger which cannot be altered ever and records every single transaction):

https://www.wired.com/story/monero-privacy/