By those measures, you may as well say Bitcoin is "useful" for Chinese millionaires to evade exchange controls whereas before they were forced to have Rolexes up their arms on the plane from Shanghai. Or in supporting the graphics card market. And none of those applications for gold explain its price movements when, for example, Russia invaded Ukraine. That the other two instruments were as you say used in speculation means they also had no intrinsic worth in their price, no?
I dunno, I feel like crypto is just an exaggerated version of most other asset classes, not at all uniquely terrible in its own right.
I'm not debating whether it's useful or not -- I'm debating whether it brings a net positive to society. So far, its been used to avoid sanctions and currency loss by nutty regimes running countries -- as well as massively used by criminals to conduct fraud -- not to mention the few exchanges which are shady as hell one of which has just been revealed to be a giant scam (FTX). It turns out that regulation can come in to be useful when stuff like this happens -- no? I've personally seen a few firms attacked by ransomware criminals demanding bitcoin as payment and I've seen countless of new outlets reporting corrupt regimes using it to fund their programs (like North Korea using it to fund their nuclear program: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/06/north-korea-hackers-stole-cr...) with none of the crypto-enthusiasts reporting on this. Add in the enormous energy expenditure used to keep the charade up and you have a worthless pyramid scheme being hyped up and branded as 'the next Rosetta stone' of asset-classes or currencies or whatever it is that they're branding it as by people who have 0 understanding of how economics nor money nor banking work. These days though all the above doesn't matter. As long as someone gets theirs and 'stonk only go up - GME and AMC' wave of 'investors' is here so I'll just watch this and take notes, but mark my words: this idiocy will be branded as one of the most illogical and delusional pyramid schemes ever crafted by man when we look back through history.
I dunno, I feel like crypto is just an exaggerated version of most other asset classes, not at all uniquely terrible in its own right.