Whether or not you need that will depend on where the world goes. A CDBC social-credit system world presents a lot of incentives to use something else.
And if you do need it, you need it ahead of time. Good luck trying to learn and set up networks from scratch when they are considered illegal etc.
In practice you need a bank account to use bitcoin, there's essentially nobody who uses bitcoin that doesn't have a bank account, so the "no intermediaries" thing isn't really meaningful, nobody cares about this.
[0]: https://www.bitcoin.com/get-started/how-to-locate-and-use-a-...
[1]: https://coingeek.com/localbitcoins-restricted-to-only-10-sta...
LocalBitcoins is not practical, nobody wants to meet up in the streets to trade cash for bitcoins.
The Canadian truckers didn't have bank accounts for a moment (maybe still ongoing). As financial prosecution, eventually algorithmically (have you seen on the threads on HN recently about people getting permabanned from various services for seemingly no reason?) ramps up, and CDBC rolls out...
There is no constitutional guarantee for the freedom to use payment networks so this inevitably will be used as leverage for compliance with anything governments/national banks want
It was Canadian truckers yesterday, Russians today - are we so naive to think it will be nobody tomorrow? Or are we ok with the exiling of people from society as long as its somebody we don't like?
The people who hate the intermediaries are the sellers, because they don't like losing a small % of their sale to a payment processor. But sellers do not have the power to change this. They have to accept payment in whatever form customers are willing to provide it in. Customers aren't going to move away from PayPal and credit cards without a good reason, and so far crypto has failed to provide that reason.
In general this is just an illustration of the racket between banks and card companies, since customers really only seek to pay using the payment options their bank provides upon opening an account, although I guess that's not a surprise given Visa started out under Bank of America[0].
If banks provided a crypto wallet that had all the benefits of regular accounts like direct deposit and FDIC insurance, which they might eventually do[1], I doubt many would hesitate to use it. The only barrier would be if using the crypto wallet presented a fee that Visa and the rest of the card industry loves to keep a secret by charging the merchant instead, with the merchant passing on those costs to the customer in the form of higher MSRPs.
0: https://minesafetydisclosures.com/blog/2019/5/29/part-l-a-hi...
1: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/what-is-a-central-bank-d...
You're connecting to some nodes, right, to send the transaction? Those are intermediaries. Very very few holders of crypto run their own nodes, these days.
Well, you rely on a bunch of intermediaries, but the profit incentive outweighs the power of any large (but still minority) intermediary blocking specific transactions at will.
