I can think of many use cases that may be non trivial to get running. For example, if crypto had a privacy layer, which a lot of people are working on right now, it could easily enable a secondary market in digital goods, subscriptions etc. Imagine you bought a 1 year subscription to something which is locked behind some credentials. 2 months down the line you feel you're not using it a lot and would like to get some of your money back by trading those credentials. Crypto networks would enable a secondary market for those. Sure it can be done with web2 but crypto presents another possible solution.

It could also be a way to organise open source software communities around paid work that can incentivise activity around the preferences of the donor, in addition to the current model of free volunteer work. Even NFTs could be used as an abstraction for the access of digital properties. Their popular use for distributing art became a limiting distraction.

10 years since BTC is hardly enough time for anything. As more sophisticated features are developed for the underlying networks, good use cases will come. A lot of oxygen was sucked out by use cases involving speculative investment.

The gambling aspect of crypto is never going away and I don’t think its a problem. Some responsibility has to be taken by the people who chose to trust scammers with their money. In fact at the height of the NFT craze people who are public influencer types were openly scamming and rug pulling marks on fucking youtube. How many of them got arrested? It is right to ask for action against criminals. But instead of that you have US government agencies trying to shut down an entire sector of commerce just because some guy made important people in seats of power look bad. None of this is being done to protect the people who lost money.

I don't think crypto is valuable for things like poverty alleviation etc. That is a challenge which has to be taken up by individual countries. Anyone who says crypto is going to save the world should be looked at with as much scepticism as the tech founders 10 years back who were claiming to do the same thing.

Crypto is super interesting technology that is one of the few tools that can fight the inexorable oligarchization and centralisation of all things in this world. It can make a lot of people very rich by providing them with opportunities that wouldn’t be possible under the current system of monopolies and governments controlling access to everything. For that reason it doesn’t deserve to die.

In any case, SEC can only set back the adoption of crypto networks in the US. But as tech proliferates around the world, cutting crypto off from the home of “tech” will not kill crypto. It just pushes the timetable back a little bit.

How? If CEX operations are restricted in the US due to excessive, antiquated, or ambiguous regulations, citizens would be left with fewer ways to acquire these assets including research and hobby usage.

To continue with Molly’s drug analogy: look at psilocybin, where academic, hobbyist, and medical research in them has been delayed for many decades due to unreasonable legal restrictions and ideological campaigns against them.