I figured the fact that they are mandatory right now was obvious enough to not go into it too much.
What do you mean by "mandatory right now"?
Mandatory meaning required features of a medium of exchange. Mandatory right now as in they exist right now because there is a demand for these features and there always has been and probably always will be. Not sure how to explain it further. I feel like we're wasting time with the obvious.
Historically, the choice has been to either lug around gold / chickens / whatever or use some sort of "note".
That's clearly not the case today with the vast majority of purchases being performed with cards of some sort. In 2011, only 27% of all point-of-sales purchases in the US were made with cash (
reference).
I would have to say that the choice has always been made to carry around a receipt on a chicken or gold or grain or whatever. Furthermore that still is the case today as in your example, all credit card purchases, electronic transfers, etc, not just physical cash, are exchanges in notes by way of increasing or decreasing accounting entries of them. The reserves today is "monetized government debt".
Physical notes are the very antithesis of anonymous. I'm not sure how you can say otherwise
In all seriousness, I do understand what you are saying, but cash is almost always used in a situation where your anonymity is completely comprised already (face-to-face and, most likely, face-to-multiple-cameras).
C'mon now please, I almost think you are being purposefully thick as you wildly miss the point that it is not the anonymity between transactors that is important, but rather preserving anonomity of the parties in regards to outside parties such as the government, employers, spouses, friends, enemies, strangers, etc.
On the other hand, the forever in its entirety public blockchain/NSA/criminal botnet data mining/ISP traffic analysis/corporate controlled routing/subpoena risk combination is definitely not anonymous. Even if you succeed in being completely anonymous with bitcoin, your anonymity is forever at risk as soon as you transact with somebody who doesn't care or has slipped up.
No. Bitcoin
can offer whatever level of privacy you want, regardless of what the person receiving the transaction does. Providing you're not getting something shipped to you, the maximum amount a vendor can leak is the payment transaction and item(s) purchased. That's the same as cash, but a lot less potential leakage than with a credit card.
I have to totally disagree. This issue is much broader than your narrow example and has been discussed in numerous places in this forum and there are many articles on the interwebz about it.
Personally, I think what will happen - and this addresses multiple points - is that all point-of-sale purchases will happen off-chain, particularly small amounts. This allows instant confirmations while decreasing the effort needed to maintain privacy towards the vendor. (Effort still needs to be made to maintain privacy towards the third party providing the payment service.) This will add a slight cost to your transaction, but direct debit charges are very small (usually a small fraction of a percent) and this would be comparable.
There are a number of ways funding such a third party "account" could work (and if preserving privacy towards the vendor is a feature you want, "trust" that the third party isn't going to abscond with your money is necessary) and various technical methods of implementing the payment process and information stored on card / phone, all with varying features, but that would be beyond the scope of this thread.
For larger amounts or high risk transactions, using on-chain transactions and waiting for confirmations would be worth the wait.
These things you describe are going to have to compete against the simple issuance, use, and guaranteed redemption of inert receipts on crypto reserves and accounting entries thereof, which is much simpler and more widely adoptable by the masses. I hear the word "masses" as in "mass adoption" and i think "simple" and "throughout history". This is just my opinion, which i believe is fairly logical. In any case the premise of this topic is that these notes are a foregone conclusion although i don't mind the side debate of whether they will be in demand enough to spring into existence, like we are having.
Higher adoption in the local physical world? Logical fallacy / circular logic.
...
Requiring A in order to achieve A is the very definition of circular logic. A = high adoption, in this case.
Again, it's almost as if you are being obtuse on purpose. I'm talking about the adoption of cryptocurrency in general. The use of notes on crypto reserves is something that will foster adoption of crypto as a medium of exchange in general for a much wider range of people. I'm not trying to say that we need to use notes to foster the use of notes. Gimme a break.
Furthermore, although i didn't state it in the OP, it should be implicit that there would be banks or "wallets" coming into existence storing accounting entries of these notes, much like checking accounts, and these accounting entries can be reversed asymmetrically. I'm not saying I'm an advocate of this, I'm just saying it can be done, and the masses might mandate this in cases of fraud, non delivery, etc.
All of this could be implemented by a third party "wallet" using off-chain transactions at a much cheaper cost and lower risk than printing currency.
Is this not transacting in accounting entries of receipts issued on crypto reserves? Sounds exactly like it, unless I am missing something. You didn't give enough details.
The casascius coin, windowed envelope thing unfortunately can't work i don't think, because i don't think there is ultimately a way you can get around having to trust the maker of the thing to not know what the priv key is, and hence not spend the coin, like wheatstone pointed out. I don't think you can create a private key and truly prove you don't know what it is. I've tried to think my out of this exact problem for awhile and it's been on a thread or two with no good solutions (that I saw). Maybe with zero knowledge proofs or creative multi sigs or escrowing, but even leveraging all these features, i still don't see how you can achieve it.
Third party payment processing is the way this will happen. Yes, you will have to trust that third party with your money, but to lower the risk, the account could be funded as little as possible (and not reused). Although I said it was beyond the scope of this thread, I could go into great detail about how such a scheme could be constructed to give a maximum amount of privacy with a minimum amount of effort, should you wish
As you said, this still requires trust and is not nearly as simple for a broad range of people as some entity flat out guaranteeing to give you a bonafide crypto amount in the blockchain for an inert piece of paper or coin wherever you got it from, or vice versa, no questions asked.
