It is a goal of crypto to be an independent medium of exchange, free from governments and to some extent the rest of the economy, and perhaps even someday become the basis of the economy itself.

That does not mean it has done these things. It does not mean it has failed these things either, because goals frankly don't mean much. This is in one of my favorite classes of wisdom, "things that sound obvious when I say them but observably by their actions most people aren't thinking this way." Do not be too quick to say to yourself "oh, yes, jerf I know that goals aren't results", because, again, by their actions many people observably do not have this as clear in their head when they are planning and acting as they may think.

As for the results of crypto, it is certainly clear that crypto is a haven for scams, pyramid schemes, and pump-and-dumps. That also on its own does not disqualify it; I think there's more in crypto proportionally than the US dollar but all fiat currencies have also had scams, pyramid schemes, and pump-and-dumps denominated in them. It is much less clear that crypto has attained its listed goals; there is non-zero evidence that they are in play, but it is also very mixed evidence and you can find plenty of evidence to the contrary of all the things I list.

Crypto has largely existed in a regime with 0% interest, as was mentioned. It is a very viable theory that despite the goals of crypto of being an independent currency, that it is in fact a derivative of existing fiat currency. As for the evidence, there is the fact that it is acting exactly like a very leveraged fiat derivative would be acting when money stops being free, which doesn't necessarily perfectly logically prove the case but is strong evidence. Perhaps someday crypto will be independent but it isn't putting on a very convincing show of it right now. Instead it's looking an awfully lot like the most leveraged fiat currency derivative there is out there at the moment, or at least the most leveraged one us normals can see.

As a simple example: BTC stopped dropping and actually rose $1000 on Thursday when the CPI numbers came out indicating that inflation grew less than expected last month. This shouldn't happen if crypto was actually an inflation hedge. Instead, almost all of crypto's value is speculation-based and so when the supply of money is more expensive (i.e. higher interest rates), the value of crypto assets in USD tends to decline and vice versa when interest rates are predicted to be lower (or not rise as much as expected).

Bitcoin makes Argentina and Venezuela look like bastions of hard money. It’s lost purchasing power, i.e. inflated, at an astronomical rate.