The UK example just shows that a decentralised blockchain approach isn’t required to meet the use case you are describing - in fact it’s worse for the described use case in almost every metric.
Having a different, worse alternative isn’t exactly something to shout about.
whether it is better or worse for each of those depends who you ask and what their goals are, and also in what year you ask. ten years ago it was inconceivable to do these things with crypto, ten years from now it may be that these systems will continue to improve in terms of fees, privacy, scalability and user experience. consider the current cohort of users to be beta testers who are taking on additional risk and technical burden while the system continues to improve.
How would paying in crypto avoid app store fees? Presumably you mean the Apple / Google App Stores, when Apple or Google will still want to take their 30%? How do you bypass that?
> purchasing digital assets like art
Who is using Crypto to purchase art? (Note: NFTs are not purchasing Art, you own some metadata that refers to a piece of art publicly hosted somewhere else). I can certinaly use my fiat currency to purchase both the rights to artworks, to purchase actual physical art pieces without having to jump through payment hoops, and even to purchase on-demand streaming of performance art. I cant really do any of that with Crypto without turning it back into regular fiat currency first (without searching out the tiny amount of places that accept crypto directly, but even then - whats the advantage to just paying in fiat?).
I mean I'm entirely unconvinced there is a compelling real use-case in anything listed here.
> ten years ago it was inconceivable to do these things with crypto, ten years from now it may be that these systems will continue to improve in terms of fees, privacy, scalability and user experience.
IMO if a technology is actually transformative, it will find a valid use case quicker than this. The only real use-cases I have seen seem to have been creating ponzi-schemes, effectively laundering money and speculative gambling on the price.
> you can just use cash?
this question sorta gets at one of the primary values of crypto, that it’s peer to peer, transferred non custodially and pseudonymous. many countries are moving away from cash into digital only forms of transactions, and having a system that upholds peer to peer transactions can be useful.
replace abortion in that example with other legally questionable actions depending on your state. maybe buying marijuana or psilocybin for medical purposes, paying somebody like Edward Snowden for giving a lecture, or purchasing a VPN subscription. for citizens who are rebelling against their state in some way, such as abortion rights protests, or climate activism like extinction rebellion, or a person that lives in a less democratic regime, it may be desirable to use certain crypto systems to mitigate state oversight.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/14/style/abortion-crypto-don...
The point is it's not buying art though.
I can sell you an NFT of my house, and promise to only ever mint one NFT of my house, but that's different to selling you my house.
