> So does crypto [...]
I'd wager that this is a lie. Please name one.
These systems are self referential. Great if all to do is speculate with value changes inside the system.
Other use cases? In short: no one has come up with any solution to the oracle problem.
As soon as you want to exchange anything crypto with anything but crypto (e.g. USD or a physical asset like a loaf of bread) you need trust.[1]
* Buying VPN relays anonymously, for connecting to through Tor, VPSes etc.
* Buying drugs.
* Donating to causes sanctioned by your country.
* Paying informants.
* Allowing you to prove you're the author of something, or knew a secret, later on.
* "Dead hand" schemes which release information if your wallet activity stops for more than a couple weeks. This keeps people from killing you to keep something from getting out.
* Online gambling.
* Evading financial controls to send money to your family abroad.
Some of this doesn't require any trust (e.g. proving you knew something before some date), most of the rest requires trust, but what makes crypto useful for these cases isn't lack of trust but auditability, anonymity and/or lack of control by authorities.
Honestly, using crypto for something like seems a bit nuts, like using a jackhammer to destroy a cardboard box.
Which is closely tied to the fallacy that using crypto(currencies) gives you anonymity.
Cash gives you better anonymity than any crypto currency currently in wide circulation for the applications you listed.
They are currencies. I've gotten paid for services in XMR.
> I'd wager that this is a lie. Please name one.
Alibaba ran a Foreign Exchange service on top of crypto. I don't know if it is still running or not. It functioned like Western Union. Customers sent local currency to Alibaba, Alibaba bought crypto with that local currency and in another country sold that crypto for foreign currency and then deposited it into the foreign currency account.
In any case, your argument presumes some desire to get rid of the correspondent banks. Most people don't have that desire, they just want the money to go from A-B reasonably cheaply, and there are existing great solutions for that except at the fringes — like criminals, avoiding sanctions, avoiding capital controls, etc — which is why crypto stays on those fringes.
Yes, it is for the fringes. One day Alibaba could find itself on the fringes, as collateral damage in some geopolitical dispute that locks it out of the centralized global financial system, as a result of which country it is based in.
I have no idea if this concern motivated Alibaba's reliance on crypto though.
Potentially the involvement of those banks is a feature and provides value?
Things to ponder...
I suspect cryptocurrency will be a store of value far further into the future than gold. Gold becomes plentiful once extracting resources from asteroids becomes economically viable.
The UN saved more than 40,000 USD per month in bank transfer costs by using blockchain.