I think in general, people are excited by technology that's innovative and promising. It doesn't have to solve problems better or more efficiently today but it should have some clear path to doing so, yeah.
> Now if your question is why are markets useful, then that is obvious is it not?
I guess what I'm asking is why are markets for crypto tokens useful? If I built great tech around markets but it only let you exchange week old chicken nuggets would that be valuable?
> From your other comments, it is clear that you have already decided that “all cryptocurrency are scams” so I don’t think you are arguing this point in good faith.
Substitute 'cryptocurrency' for 'entries in a MySQL store' and re-read everything that's been posted here.
Going to the moon yielded amazing technological advances, in engineering, in materials science, in physics, chemistry, national identity, etc and promises to do so again as we iterate. Capital and research expenditure isn't negative sum. Then who knows what we might find out there?
Crypto is not new technology in any way. It's a 10-year-old recombination of 20-year-old tooling. Merkle trees and hashcash. That's it. All the money being spent on it is paying miners in China to repeatedly hash numbers and pay their electric bills. There's no research, no innovation. Just people selling each other spreadsheet cells they're sure are going to be worth something one day because 'blockchain'. It's religious, not scientific. Combine that with the world of finance, zero regulation and irreversibility, there's no way to make it anything other than a scammer's paradise. Scamming people is a feature, not a bug. All based on what, the idea that 'inflation is theft' and 'the gubmint shouldn't tell me who to send money to'? Any ECON-101 class will set you straight.
It's actively anti-efficient, regressive in terms of user experience and negative-sum: the more the price goes up the more you have to pay miners, the more cash needs to come into the system to keep the price stable. PoW isn't decentralized (>51% of BTC hashpower is concentrated in a few mining pools in the PRC), it's not trustless (PRC), it's not fast (7tx/sec), it's not cheap, it's not a good store of value and it fails to solve human problems (deflationary in the face of an expanding population and economy).
It's abjectly failed at every one of it's stated goals, all that's left is 'number go up.' What's to like?