Except for the ability to easily take assets across borders to leave authoritarian regimes, bringing a form of storing assets to the 2 billion or so unbanked individuals of the world, and comparatively cheap remittances for people sending money back to their families in another country. These are just a few worth mentioning that quite literally change people's lives.
No practical purpose EXCEPT for the ability to easily take assets across borders to leave authoritarian regimes, bringing a form of storing assets to the 2 billion or so unbanked individuals of the world, and comparatively cheap remittances for people sending money back to their families in another country. These are just a few of the incredibly practical use cases that quite literally change people's lives.
That is the logical conclusion of the institutions, since they are basically crypto banks. However the underlying coins are very different from the underlying asset in a bank, even if their use cases haven't come to fruition and the most common use case is speculation. The use cases that currently exist and are important, though probably not to users in this forum, are borderless transference and the ability to truly own your assets without a governing body or third party institution able to touch them. A significant portion of the world either: lacks institutional banking or is under an authoritarian / corrupt government that could seize their assets just because. Which means the current use cases are incredibly valuable to those individuals. For most users here coins are probably a novelty used for speculation or asset diversification.
The next entity in the supply chain would have an odometer that didn't match the picture that was previously posted. It limits who is possibly at fault to a minimum of one of two parties, which I'm sure could be narrowed down further by corroborating evidence. It highly discourages it because at the very least, you would be the first suspect with no real finger to point.