There are some legitimate use cases for decentralized ledgers and other "crypto-like" tech.
As far as I'm aware, none of those involve anything that looks remotely like financial speculation.
As far as I'm aware, none of those involve anything that looks remotely like financial speculation.
ENS is the only good example, standing naturally next to many imitators and scams.
(If you ever wonder why people treat crypto as a joke, think back to this moment.)
The ENS and ens.link are different people. You have misunderstood the situation.
I'm not aware of anyway to securely scale a decentralized cryptocurrency without recursive proofs of correctness that are fast to prove and fast to verify. Every year since 2016 I've seen major progress being made in this area but we have far to go. We just barely got there in 2020. We could probably build a scalable decentralized cryptocurrency in 2020, maybe. Give it another 5-10 years of advancement like we saw over the last 5 and you will have the ability to build scalable decentralized cryptocurrencies. That doesn't mean people will build them or that even if they do the built systems won't suffer from serious drawbacks. It is a long road ahead.
Now there are other problems to solve as well, but everything i being gated right now by proofs of correctness. We have a steam engine, we can put it on rails and it can pull a small load. Unfortunately the expectation has been set that we have train that can move millions of people. The fact that we can't meet this expectation doesn't mean that steam engines or engines in general are bad.
It is unlikely that Charles Babbage is going to be able to build his difference engine and even if he does it is so complex and so prone to failure that it probably will never be commercially viable.
vs.
It is unlikely that Charles Babbage is going to be able to build his difference engine, thus proving computers can't work and have no utility.
It's just a statement.
What does "money not controlled by a central entity" do? What problem does it solve? Why do I need it?
Keep in mind that in my day to day life, I rely on a central entity, a government.
And in places where people can't, life is NOT BETTER. It's awful. We call those places failed (fragile if you want to be nice) states.
And government should be able to control money. Money is tied to the economy, it's tied to politics, it's tied to the society.
The idea that by decentralizing things money will be fully democratic is just silly. Plus, full blown democracy doesn't even work. It leads to tyranny of the masses, that's why every modern country has a constitution that basically say: "you can't do that, no matter how much you want, since you can't abuse others you don't like[1]".
[1] In practice, "can't do that" means something really hard to do, usually stuff like "persuade at least 67% of your countrymen to let you do it", to rein in the insanity.