>When have I ever said that you should invest in cryptocurrency?

Sorry, I should have been clear I didn't mean you. I've heard so many crypto promoters ignore my comments and tell me I don't understand unless I buy the token. Asking me to fork their project and start selling my own token is dangerously close to what they say, so please don't ask me to do that either. No one can solve the problem with ponzi schemes by creating more ponzi schemes.

>That is a narrow and inaccurate portrayal of how the extralegal markets operate.

It wasn't meant to be a complete portrayal, it's just one example. Fraud is rampant in those markets.

>The more that vendors/customers use a cryptocurrency as an actual medium of exchange, the less volatility there will be because vendors/customers will be forced to stomach the change in price over the course of a transaction (for better or for worse)

But this doesn't make sense. You're not saying there's actually less volatility, you're saying the users will just be forced to accept extreme volatility. That's markedly different from what's happening with the USD. And why should they accept it? Why would they want to be forced to accept a 50% increase in the price of something over 10 minutes? There's no reason for them to do that other than the (entirely philosophical) insistence from blockchain programmers that there should never be any price stabilization because capital controls are bad, and completely free unregulated markets are somehow good despite that you can very obviously see how that philosophy is repeatedly and directly causing people to lose their life savings gambling in the various crypto frauds and hacks and bankruptcies.

>I use cryptocurrency as a payment network all the time, and I accept the risks. It is good for my use case.

I disagree that it's good for your use case, because crypto is bad for any use case. I'm serious, it's that useless of a technology. There's nothing it does that can't be better served by something else. Perhaps you just haven't looked at the other alternatives?

>You cannot trust banks to implement proper security and privacy when they benefit from obscurity and surveillance.

You cannot trust crypto companies to implement that either, judging by the ridiculous amount of times they've suffered catastrophic hacks and thefts. Or sometimes they just openly run a ponzi scheme that's guaranteed to lose your money no matter how secure or private it is.

>regulation of cryptocurrencies may not seem ethically the same as regulation of strong encryption, but it is effectively just as difficult if not impossible.

No it's not, you just crack down on the exchanges and stablecoin issuers. Those are incredibly centralized by necessity, and almost all the liquidity and pumping can be traced directly back to them. They were all fraudulent from the start too; without them, very very few people would have any use for crypto at all. Get rid of them and it's obvious to even the most clueless of crypto investors that the emperor has no clothes.

>The fraud protection is designed to prevent double spending.

Double-spend is only one type of fraud among a countless other ways to commit fraud. See all the other fraud and theft that is committed by various crypto companies on a daily basis.

>If "fraud prevention" involves a third party who puts their thumb on the scale and gets to determine what is or isn't fraud, then it's not desirable for a trust-less network.

This sentence is nonsense. Blockchains are fundamentally not a trustless network, you're trusting that the miners (a third party who puts their thumb on the scale) will maintain the network in a certain way that you interpret as being fair. Just like with cash, there are certain things the government can to do crack down on the illicit use of cash, you just trust that they won't do it.

>With cryptocurrency users can expose themselves to as many third parties as they voluntarily choose (e.g. a Bisq-like trading system).

What possible reason would any user have to want to "voluntarily" expose themself to fraud and theft?