“If you want to have Euros why not just use Euros?”
It sounds like something someone would say if they had never read a single page about cryptocurrency.
Euro transfers are not censorship resistant*. A Chinese citizens can use stablecoins to move money in and out of China - euros do not provide such a solution because they can't purchase more than $50,000 of foreign currency through the banking system.
That alone is enough justification for the existence of stablecoins - let alone the fact that they can be much more suitable for online commerce than custodially held fiat currency. There is a chicken and egg problem of requiring widespread usage before you see the benefits, for mainstream cases, but chicken and egg problems are much easier to solve than people tend to think - it's just a matter of first finding growth in marginal use cases where censorship resistance provides sufficient advantage to overcome the hurdles of lack of widespread acceptance.
*Admittedly, neither is Tether, DAI or USDC, but other stablecoins are or can be
Completely agree. Censorship resistance is a major element of the benefits of a Peer to Peer Digital Cash, or Hybrid Digital Money as I termed it in this post.
Interestingly this economist is quite well versed in Cryptocurrency, but I think the point he was making was why try to create a pegged instrument, why not just use the real instrument. It does miss the points you made.
On the other side of the conversation was a trader making points that printing cash on paper and making physical coins was dirtier, from an Environmental point of view, than mining Bitcoin. Probably not an interview worth sharing :)
It seems like a question any economist should be able to answer for themselves. People make futures contracts for oil, corn etc. because a derivative of a commodity doesn't have entirely the same characteristics as the base commodity. Just in the same way that buying a futures contract enables certain things that buying the commodity itself does not (especially hedging against unpredictable future events), a crypto derivative has characteristics that "real" fiat does not have.
Even custodially backed stablecoins like Tether (which I don't recommend anyone use), while it is not truly censorship resistant, it faces different censorship risks. If Tether claims that your money is stolen, then it is possible they could freeze your account as they have several times in the past. However, for example if you were using it to evade capital controls, it is pretty unlikely Tether would freeze your account. A bank account would not work for this.
I remember a couple years back a study was done on what the primary usage of TetherUSD was, and at the time it was mostly used for moving money across the border between China and Russia. Clearly the people doing this must have had a reason for not using bank accounts to do the same thing (presumably it's more difficult, or expensive, or perhaps they were doing something illegal and avoiding banks for that reason).