I also think you're failing to appreciate the benefit of having technologies that allow for a viable grey market. A third of people born today do not have government identification [1], and therefore cannot participate in the legal identity-based financial system. To increase their participation, the "crime" of unregulated commerce has to become more frequent in many countries.
In countries like Venezeula, cryptocurrencies are starting to play a role as a secure (by Venezuelan standards) safe haven for their wealth [2]. All of this activity is criminal according to the Venezuelan state, yet it is undoubtedly beneficial to Venezuelan society, in preventing corrupt state apparatuses from expropriating and squandering the meager private wealth of Venezuelans through hyper-inflation.
It also doesn't take much imagination to envision a future where tokenised finance on the blockchain helps millions of entrepreneurs around the world better access global capital markets. Speculation, which has created a token market worth billions [3], is just the first use-case enabled by this technology to conduct much more frictionless financial transactions. There will be more. I would also argue that this speculation, as chaotic as it is, is helping to bootstrap the industry, just as the dot com bubble did for the internet sector in the late 1990s.
So while I do think there is an enormous amount of hype in the cryptocurrency market, and that many will suffer losses from making bad investment decisions, I think this needs to be put in the context of the speculation underlying the value of major traditional assets, the promise the technology holds beyond speculation, and the capabilities it is already proving to have.
[1] https://twitter.com/NickSzabo4/status/544994985414639616
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/venezuela...