Thanks to FC I've been diving a bit more into stablecoins lately and see a lot of the potential. But am I wrong in thinking that it mostly (for now) is just externalizing a lot of the costs/inefficiencies/regulations to the end user? Obtain wallet, buy coins, pay transaction fee, pay taxes, etc. Please forgive newb and/or stupid question.

it does have external costs to get set up

arguably part of these are growing pains for anyone trying to set up a new system / payment rails

the benefits ofc (once you get past them) are pretty sweet tho:
- almost zero-fee foreign exchange swaps
- almost zero-fee sends
- fees are flat, and do not scale with size
- assets can be immediately productive (e.g. rehypothecated into treasuries, onchain lending markets, etc.)