The religious wars within the cryptocurrency community are fascinating to watch and are the single biggest reason I doubt we'll ever see a meaningful use for cryptocurrency or blockchain other than speculation.
But it seems like the primary use cases are speculation, criminal and terrorist funding schemes, tax evasion, and money laundering.
If I buy Apple stock, technically that's tied to a corporation named Apple that has assets and revenue (more or less, maybe less these days than you might assume). But bitcoins are just numbers, some more valuable than others.
But more to the point, hoarders were encouraging the use of bitcoin as a store of value, lying about their true use cases (speculation), hoping the big fish would start investing so the early people would cash out. It turned out to be one massive pump and dump scheme, but with cryptography, so that makes it okay.
You can only vote with your feet so many times, and if the choice is always to flee instead of demanding accountable government, eventually there will be no place to go. By providing a workaround for government non-accountability, Bitcoin encourages people to avoid the issue instead of engaging with it.
You could say that about every defense-in-depth based approach to a problem. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're a net negative.
It's not perfect, but you have higher odds of moving 10k+ in Bitcoin out of an oppressive system than you do any other asset.
Most of my thinking you can read crypto as bitcoin i.e. some general payment system, where in bitcoin's case its stated purpose is sort of this inexorable transaction system, it feels intuitive that the meaningful use space is intrinsically going to be fringe/taboo, because it's outside government, outside permission. I know its cliche that freedom isn't free, but what is the honest practical value of freedom unless it's scarce i.e. its impossible or someone it trying to stop you?
But the point is that crypto may be an inherently fringe construct, it may provide no benefit to society because its value add might solely live in activities outside the confines of society at large. Now you can argue whether that is a net positive or negative for humanity, but I think that if "that's it", you know, I think that is a meaningful use.
I feel like the cryto has a different story. There is a struggle to find utility because the structure of the system has too many holes.
For bitcoin electrical usage is the true currency + specialized gpus. Anyone who has unlimited power + boards can take all. The side effect is wasting resources for no reason.
For other coins each has there own story.
At the core we want people to do something valuable as side effect of obtaining prove. I'm not sure we're close.
So, nobody can take all, then. Even putting aside power, nobody has unlimited boards. The supply of GPUs is very tightly limited by real-world factors, as anybody who tried to buy an AMD GPU a few years ago found out.
I worked for a crypto startup in ~2017. Our product wrote a decent number of transactions to the Bitcoin blockchain, so when transaction fees went from a dime to $20 it caused a lot of headaches and I ended up dealing with it. When I asked questions online about managing transaction fees, I inadvertently wandered into a holy war and was thoroughly flamed for my trouble. It was the least pleasant experience I've had trying to get help as a dev. How can such a toxic community grow and achieve anything meaningful?
HEX is a lulzworthy new issuance stretching the imagination of the market by someone I’m not even sure could pass KYC with any bank
It’s like if WeWork actually did become publicly traded by issuing shares at different prices over 365 days. It would be a non-sequitur for an outside observer to dismiss the problems - and some actual religious affinity towards Adam Neumann - as why the US markets won’t go anywhere. Itd would be A) what are you talking about and B) nonsense drivel like that is just giving WeWork a pass by criticizing the whole market instead of a shitty offering and organization