Frankly almost everything to do with finance I would rather live without and crypto is just more of that. To me, everything blockchain related is people popping a boner over an ever increasing bureaucracy of money.
That's a valid statement. It creates a hyper-monetization of sorts. I struggle with it too, although less. I think there are other way to think about it. And feel free to accuse me of mental gymnastics. But I sort of came to blockchain for the espoused values associated with Ethereum, so I am projecting those perhaps.
There have been real-life experiments with local and community currencies, for example the Ithaca Hours and Boulder Bucks (and many others [1]). The point of them is to have something that accrues value and keeps it inside of a group, unlike the government issues currency which knows no bounds and can easily be extracted from a community. I see online (and local [2]) communities and DAOs that issue tokens and distribute them to a more restricted member group doing the equivalent of that. In effect you are not creating a parallel currency to the national one but creating a space where another means of representing value exists. For an example of a community with strong internal economics check out the builder collective 1hive [3]. What is actually happening here, I think, is not finance in traditional sense (although there is plenty of that, sure) but something that to me resembled anarcho-syndicalist utopias or restructuring of the capitalistic system around human relationships. In a world of a multitude of community currencies things like Uniswap's AMM provide interfaces between community microcosms.
Then there is another thing I think should be considered. Something like half of the population of the world has no access to banking. And then for the large portion of the ones who do the banking systems are terribly opaque and unstable. In Russia for example almost everybody holds their money in a single government-controlled bank because trust in the banking is super low. "Westerns", I feel, deeply under-appreciate the hardship shitty banking causes to people. (There are, btw, blockchains that specifically target the unbanked/underbanked populations that have limited access to financial instruments, and I do not mean in an exploitative way.) And even if you live in a place with a great financial system then plenty of people are restricted from harnessing it's potential. For example accredited investor laws might be seen as protective but they also prevent common folk from participating in all sorts of promising endeavors and getting a share of the wealth. So, yes, I am with you on that financialization is not all pretty, but at the moment it serves some people well and others very poorly or not at all and the latter group has much to gain from it.
