* Distributed consensus schemes are not useful only for monetary applications. When they are used as such, there exist mechanisms to commit to a certain fiat price and minimize market exposure to the point where transactions are almost free, in fiat terms.
* The disbursement of tokens and the distributed consensus rewards do not need to be tied together like in Bitcoin. A premined token like Stellar can offer very strong security guarantees without needing mining pools (but of course, any kind of imaginable database is vulnerable to majority attacks, so that means nothing by itself)
* The limited block capacity is a Bitcoin-specific problem that incidentally motivated interesting results in off-chain transactions (Lightning).
* The sorry state of the distributed financial markets says nothing about the technology and more about human greed and the slow capacity of regulators to adapt; critically, smart contracts and distributed algorithms enable control mechanism and hard guarantees that have no old world equivalent, they can eliminate counterparty risks, guarantee solvency and fair arbitration etc.
That being said, 95% of the times the word "blockcahin" is uttered these days, what follows is most likely bullshit.