Unless the national exchange is hosting wallets it controls on behalf of individual citizens, or acting as an intermediary for all transactions—in which case you’ve negated all the features of Bitcoin and may as well be using any random currency with the government as shared banker—I don’t see how it does.
I mean, sure, “the government will be your bank for free” solves the problem of the unbanked, but renders the identity and features of the underlying currency mostly irrelevant.
Except the main benefit of BTC is really the lack of printability. Governments can't just make more of it even if they run the LN for their country. That said I don't think it will come to full LN centralization either.
There are still other cryptos that have further benefits as well.
Monero for example is fully private and can do ~1500tps on chain atm. Bitcoin adoption is just one avenue to competing currencies that bring freedom back. If the LN can remain distributed and bring anonymity to its users, then great, but if not there's still further alternatives, and with decentralized exchanges, governments won't be able to stop the use of a better system.
Currency competition is just plain great for human rights and freedom.
Just like paying "Mastercard dollars" at the store means it might as well be pesos? Presumably for transactions that are worth paying blockchain fees, you'd use the blockchain.
> Just like paying "Mastercard dollars" at the store means it might as well be pesos?
I’m talking about specifically the benefit being sold as “Bitcoin is solving the problem of the unbanked”: if the solution involves the government being a free universal payment intermediary, the underlying currency choice isn’t what is solving the problem of tje unbanked, its the government providing free universal banking services, to which the underlying currency is mostly irrelevant, that is solving that problem.
The currency choice might be relevant to other things, though.
> you’ve negated all the features of Bitcoin and may as well be using any random currency with the government as shared banker
Since the goals are to 'give people without bank accounts access' and 'To make it easier to send back remittance payments'. I suppose they are just negating the value of bitcoin in general, though not for their specific use-case. Especially give the fact that the current legal tender there is currently USD which anyhow does not give the country any control over monetary policy.
