Re: Tech details needed to give cryptocoins the benefits mandatory for true adoption
Believe it or not, I am not being purposefully obtuse 
To take two main points:
A) I fundamentally disagree with you about the properties of the currently most-widely-used mechanism of payment (cards), particularly with respect to anonymity / privacy.
B) I fundamentally disagree with you about the need for a physical "inert" carrier of value.
Starting with A... Card payments today expose an inordinate amount of information to numerous parties who are permitted to sell this information to anyone with only scant protections (or none at all if they can get consumers' "informed consent", depending on jurisdiction). The card issuer and payment processor have access to your entire purchase history (including individual items, when and where they were bought, etc.), you full name, your address, and more. This can all be avoided with a properly configured bitcoin payment process.
And B... In a country where 75% of point-of-sales transactions occur with a card, why would a digital need or want a physical, "inert" carrier of value? It's completely unrealistic and completely unnecessary. It's just not something that will ever gain wide adoption and you've given no argument as to why it would other than a historical predilection for carrying "cash". The current statistics on PoS transactions disproves your argument. In fact, the only logical argument is that the historical "mass use" has been whatever mechanism is the most convenient with whatever technology is available (weights, measures, stamps, seals, printing presses, card readers, etc). Seen in a historical perspective, "cash" is being replaced faster than any other mode of payment.
Finally, you might argue that having a third party hold your bitcoins and processing payments through them (or, indeed, any other form of off-chain payment) is equivalent to having notes (physical or otherwise) issued on (bitcoin) reserves. If so, fine, I'm not going to argue semantics.
Let me sum up a few claims / predictions of mine:
Off-chain bitcoin payments are going to be an increasingly used payment mechanism if only because it addresses two issues with bitcoin payments: anonymity and confirmation time.
These off-chain transactions are going to be digital in nature, not through the exchange of inert notes (the construction of which is completely infeasible and impractical).
To take two main points:
A) I fundamentally disagree with you about the properties of the currently most-widely-used mechanism of payment (cards), particularly with respect to anonymity / privacy.
B) I fundamentally disagree with you about the need for a physical "inert" carrier of value.
Starting with A... Card payments today expose an inordinate amount of information to numerous parties who are permitted to sell this information to anyone with only scant protections (or none at all if they can get consumers' "informed consent", depending on jurisdiction). The card issuer and payment processor have access to your entire purchase history (including individual items, when and where they were bought, etc.), you full name, your address, and more. This can all be avoided with a properly configured bitcoin payment process.
And B... In a country where 75% of point-of-sales transactions occur with a card, why would a digital need or want a physical, "inert" carrier of value? It's completely unrealistic and completely unnecessary. It's just not something that will ever gain wide adoption and you've given no argument as to why it would other than a historical predilection for carrying "cash". The current statistics on PoS transactions disproves your argument. In fact, the only logical argument is that the historical "mass use" has been whatever mechanism is the most convenient with whatever technology is available (weights, measures, stamps, seals, printing presses, card readers, etc). Seen in a historical perspective, "cash" is being replaced faster than any other mode of payment.
Finally, you might argue that having a third party hold your bitcoins and processing payments through them (or, indeed, any other form of off-chain payment) is equivalent to having notes (physical or otherwise) issued on (bitcoin) reserves. If so, fine, I'm not going to argue semantics.
Let me sum up a few claims / predictions of mine:
Off-chain bitcoin payments are going to be an increasingly used payment mechanism if only because it addresses two issues with bitcoin payments: anonymity and confirmation time.
These off-chain transactions are going to be digital in nature, not through the exchange of inert notes (the construction of which is completely infeasible and impractical).