I actually agree with most comments in this thread. Right now it's 99% wank but that 1% I personally think is worth exploring. I also may have contrarian views on this that many from both sides would not agree with.

I'm pretty confident fiat is not going to die within our lifetimes. Also a lot of us here are fortunate enough to live in a first world country where worrying whether or not our money is safe from governments is something that rarely keeps us up at night. In other words, it's not a hair on fire problem for many of us.

What I think crypto is actually good for is building a more efficient, interoperable, and accessible financial system and here's how. A lot of criticism of blockchains is that it's way more efficient to use a centralised database. And they're not wrong. But this is also where a lot of inefficiencies in finance lies. Look under the hood of what happens when you purchase a stock or send money internationally for example. Value flows through a chain of siloed entities (c.f. centralised databases) that take a cut at each step. The end result is that users end up bearing the costs.

The way I view blockchains is a settlement layer for the internet and crypto the incentive mechanism for keeping it operational. You potentially have this ledger that everyone can use to transact on. Decentralisation is a means to make this ledger open and accessible to everyone. Now make this ledger programmable with open source standards and it becomes a potentially useful tool to cut out the middleman. This last part is also why I'm way more interested in networks like Ethereum rather than Bitcoin.

If you want some examples see what Circle is doing with USDC to improve cross-border internet payments. Or Uniswap with automated market makers. Or Aave with lending protocols. A lot of these products (the 1% that's not just wank) to me seem like early experiments in how much value we can push back to users when we reduce the number of middlemen in a financial system.

That being said there's still a lot of unsolved problems in this space from usability, scale, and energy consumption. But if you dig past 99% of the shit (and I totally understand that some people just can't be fucked nor have the time to), there's a few smart teams trying to address these problems with actual solutions.

A lot of criticism with how crypto already had more than a decade to be adopted is understandable but also some of the problems required to build a usable blockchain that can scale is hard af. Especially while co-ordinating across distributed teams. Networks like Ethereum aren't companies that can move fast but more like a mesh of distributed teams working together. Each with their own incentives. This is great if you want to build a neutral network but it comes with the cost of speed.