>Then fork it yourself and change the tokenomics to suit your interests.

I don't need to fork it, the easiest solution is to just not have "tokenomics" at all. If the last several years have been any indication, those will always regress to a ponzi scheme in the end because they're all inherently backed by nothing. In my experience it's also impossible to seek any "agreement" with crypto enthusiasts because they fundamentally disagree with me on what the purpose of money is, and aren't interested in changing their mind, and (tellingly) the only way they have to get me to change my mind is to convince me to invest in one of their tokens. No thank you, it should be a huge red flag to you that the only way for someone to get involved is to become a bag holder. Even in the real world, only the most high-risk high-reward startups are even able to get away with that, and even then it's still acknowledged that you're most likely to lose your entire investment.

>The issuer does not need to be legally anything. What you need is for the peers to trust the issuer not to double spend. If the law enables that, then so be it, but the GNU Taler system can also function as part of an extralegal system.

An extralegal system is one where the other party can just run off with whatever money is in the system and not give any of it back. I'm sorry but I don't want that, I don't think anyone who doesn't like being scammed wants that. The issuer legally needs to do this if they want to avoid being fraudulent.

>The difference between GNU Taler and stablecoins is that stablecoins encourage custodial "staking" AKA investing in ponzi schemes. Whereas in GNU Taler, the issuer can only charge the users on withdrawls/deposits like a typical bank.

Yes, that's one reason why Taler is fundamentally different from a cryptocurrency.

>"because crypto companies don't care about actually being honest or responsible with customers' money?" Please. Users gravitate towards ponzi schemes because they want to be the ones scamming, even if odds are they're getting scammed themselves.

I wish you wouldn't try and victim blame and excuse the behavior of these companies. They've lied to these people by telling them it was a safe investment. This is how every confidence scam operates, by telling the victim what they want to hear.

>There is no need for cryptocurrencies to be "backed" by gold, because creating coins or double-spending is non-trivial, so there is no desperate need for additional assurances.

I'm sorry I don't understand this at all. You can observe from the extreme price volatility in every cryptocurrency, and resulting uselessness as a medium of exchange, that there is a need for additional assurances. You can't use something as a medium of exchange when its value can change 50% in a day.

>But they own that risk themselves

I hope you can see the futility (and extreme capability for fraud) of trying to create a financial system where no company wants to assume any risk, and all of it gets unconditionally pushed off onto the users. In a modern economy this is completely unusable, and it's totally outrageous that crypto people are even suggesting it.

>We need to make crime illegal again. Should civilians have access to military-grade cryptography? Bring back the crypto wars!

Less of the snark, please. It's extremely tiring to keep hearing people make false comparisons to the crypto wars. It's very clear that adding encryption into general purpose systems helps everyone. Blockchains don't help anyone unless you're trying to launch a ponzi scheme or other type of fraud. These systems are intentionally built to have no capital controls and no fraud protection whatsoever. In fact some of them are designed to purposely make it difficult to add fraud prevention in. This isn't a technical advancement that helps anyone, except huge fraudsters like Bitfinex and Coinbase that are reaping billions from "crypto investors" that are being lied to on a daily basis. We can see right now that it isn't helping anyone, but it is destroying the planet and causing a lot of people to lose their life savings. It's a big fraud, fraud is already illegal, the main problem is that it takes too long for a bureaucracy to crack down on such a large fraud.