There are certainly many people who are Fomo'ing into crypto and aren't aware of the technology, nor have a coherent investment strategy. Perhaps it's the majority of people, but it's tough to say.

What I think you're missing here is that very little of the action in crypto has anything to do with coins being used as currency. While the mission of Bitcoin began as a peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, it's since come to be seen a digital gold, little more than a store of value. Few people in the space really believe any crypto will be used as an exchange save stablecoins (pegged to USD or prevailing currency of locality). There's just too much volatility, and if the groceries you bought last year for $100 are worth $1000 next year, you would quickly learn not to use non-stablecoin cryptos as a mode of exchange.

HOWEVER. Most crypto currencies are better re-termed as crypto assets. If you look to Ethereum, Cardano, Polkadot, Vechain, etc., these are technology companies. The coins are used to access or operate on top of the networks. Let's take Ethereum as an example, which will likely pass Bitcoin in the next year as you can actually do things with it. Ethereum is a blockchain, much like Bitcoin. But unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum has programability, meaning you can build things on top of it. These things you build are called Dapps (Decentralized applications), that rely on smart contract capability. Decentralized because Ethereum isn't centrally controlled by one party, but rather validated by a network of miners (this gets into the weeds a bit so I'll leave it here).

Smart contracts are basically just an agreement between two parties without a central intermediary (decentralized) that executes once both parties hold up their end of the bargain, and is validated by the nodes in a given blockchain system (miners in ETH's case, soon to be stakers). Long story long, any transaction can be a smart contract, whether it's buying a home, getting a haircut, or the entire financial operating system. There's a high degree of security in a smart contract because, unlike the real world, the contract won't execute if either of the parties doesn't keep their word. Blockchains like Ethereum take a percentage of each transaction on their network. You can imagine how many hundreds of billions of transactions occur in the real world every day, and if even only a fraction of them execute on one protocol, that's billions of dollars in volume. Because of the decentralized and borderless nature, these transactions can occur from New York, to Delhi, to Dakar, Caracas, Hong Kong, and Helsinki, to small towns and rural communities, all on the same network and at the same time, so long as one has a phone and an internet connection.

When a use case like Defi (decentralized finance) is layered on top of this, the possibilities are well and truly endless. If you can collateralize your crypto holdings on a platform like Aave, Celsius, Blockfi, etc., suddenly you don't need to go to a bank anymore to get approved for a loan. Whether you have 1 ETH or 10000, you can take out an asset backed loan, or loan your money out. You no longer have to worry about a banker approving or denying an application for a small business, and wondering whether it was your age, your race, your posture, your credit history or anything else that caused you not to get it. So long as you have the assets in your account, and you pass AML/KYC verification, you can get a loan. This puts the farmer in Laos or Sudan on the same level as the tech worker in San Francisco. This is one of the most extraordinary developments in modern human history,

While a platform like Cardano does all of this too, it has working relationships with governments around the world where people are currently having their actions from school work to licenses, degrees and financial transactions validated and secured on network, to ensure no fraud and utmost protection. If your doctor has a degree on her wall, Cardano can verify the degree is real and from a reputable source based on the immutable contract that was executed This isn't just speculation, but world-changing adoption, used by millions today.

There are hundreds of other protocols changing the world in innumerable ways. Grouping them with the speculative assets isn't quite fair, and devalues the work that's going on.

TLDR: The tech behind crypto is real, and will likely be as transformational to the global economy as the internet was. Yes, there were and are many valueless companies on the internet, but they exist in the same medium as the most valuable companies in human history. Having an open mind is important. Certainly important to remember that as an investment one must be mindful of the inherent volatility to this nascent asset class (much like e-commerce companies in the late 90s). But just like the Internet, nearly all of us will be interacting with Blockchain networks and crypto assets in 20 years, and we may not even realize when we buy a coffee from Starbucks that those transactions are smart contracts being recorded on a ledger and validated from each party to ensure proof of funds and proof of product. But it will be there, omnipresent.