"Crypto" like Bitcoin and Monero have legitimate (non scam/non-greed-driven roots) academic roots and solve entirely real non-scam product problems. ETH is academically interesting as a platform, but as far as I've seen has not "solved" any real product problems people care about in a real way at scale that has persisted (I.e. not fads) or that don't actually NEED the concept of a Blockchain. Being able to transact and store value without a central entity solves a myriad of problems, including, but definitely not limited to:

* Sending funds internationally is much much easier, an order of magnitude less expensive, and several orders of magnitude faster than going through the traditional banking system. It's entirely next level and there are plenty of legitimate reasons why people need to send international wires.

* Transacting in legal, but morally divisive areas, where traditional banking/finance might shut down your business just because it doesn't like what you're doing or is scared of the risk. E.g. selling cannabis products, sex industry stuff (porn, sex work), gambling, etc. people may not like some of these businesses and want to impose their own morals to get rid of them, but crypto makes this impossible in ways the traditional banking system can't.

Point is: there is absolutely a toooon of BS scammery in crypto. And many naughty things it can enable. It's the financial Wild West. But to call all crypto a "BS scam" is simply untrue. It would be like calling the entire Internet a BS scam just because of what it enables (plenty of scams, online gambling, porn sites, darknet markets) and the immense energy it consumes. But like the Internet, the technology is fundamentally useful. You've got your blinders on a bit too strongly if you believe otherwise.

A person was trying to save his money, which mostly sat in banks in a country which got in a financial turmoil. No external wires were possible. He bought cryptocurrency which sold in another country and put the other currency in a bank in the save haven. He got substantial losses, around 10%, but there was a serious risk was to lose all.

Just as an illustration of a use which - for good or bad - reached the goals of the person.

That's not the whole story, some of it also has a functionality in facilitating trade of drugs and weapons.

Not monero. It is the only useful cryptocurrency in my opinion, and it is easy to understand that it is private digital cash.

Nothing screams intrinsic value like burning enormous amounts of energy just to find a set of bits that happen to hash to a value less than a target value.

But hey at least we proved that we won the race to find said hash before someone else!

I think I've seen ONE decent use of crypto so far: https://www.drips.network/

It’s eerie, right? Feeling like the only sane person in the room in crypto discussions.

for memecoins, right about the first half but almost all them do not take much to run.

it can be wagered that all the social media airtime spent on them would probably waste more electricity in the process.

Not at all.

They mostly don't have environmental impact as long as they're not PoW. Still got all the other problems.