Two things can be true at once, and I fail to see how crypto is going to keep American consumers from getting scammed when the one constant for crypto has been rugpulls and scams perpetrated on people giving crypto companies money.
you are absolutely right that crypto is the wild west right now and people are getting scammed left and right, unfortunately. That being said to experienced crypto users the difference between banking with crypto and banking with banks is night and day. Crypto is far superior. So in the long run I expect as the infrastructure around crypto improves, and the scammers are beaten back, that will extend to every day retail users as well.
Exactly. All one needs to do is just to buy Bitcoin and hold it yourself. Everything else is noise at best, scam at worse, including the fiat banking system once it unpegged from its gold backing.
Bitcoin may be useful like Gold is useful, but it's the other chains like Ethereum and NEAR that provide tremendous value. The velocity of money on NEAR (and its closest competitors I'm sure, but I don't know enough about those) is so fast and I am able to conduct business with people across the world orders of magnitude faster than was previously possible. Banks will never catch up. Crypto still has some kinks to work out, particularly for less tech savvy users, but the fundamentals are so so much better than the existing banking networks. Try doing international business at 5am on a Sunday with a bank.