Not a rhetorical question, despite the flippant phrasing. I'd absolutely love to see crypto succeed, but it doesn't look like it's gonna be useful for white and grey market transactions any time soon. For those not familiar, the white market is the documented, above-ground economy, the grey market is the informal/unlicensed economy, and the black market consists of goods and services that are outright criminalized.
Using crypto for white market transactions would arguably defeat the purpose, but on the grey market cash continues to be king, even though this is exactly where you'd expect crypto to be useful. Gold and silver intuitively seem like a good option for grey market transactions, but they're way too traceable, and while the grey market is usually left alone, when the piggies do get sicced on a given grey market you're up shit creek.
I'm Gen X, not a boomer, and have been working in tech for 30 years from software development to IT strategist. Of course crypto is a scam, or least it's a scam the way most people want to see it, as an investment.
Why is crypto valuable?
Because other people want to buy it.
Why do other people want to buy it?
Because it's valuable.
That's a pyramid scheme, and the value depends entirely on the greater fool.
I'm sure you'll try to claim the same of gold, but that's just false equivalence. Metals are physical and limited by reality, crypto can be forked infinitely. Metals have industrial value, crypto has no value other than trading for other currencies. At best, crypto is just another currency. And a bad one at that. Because for crypto to have the feature that everyone loves about it - increasing in value - that means it is by definition deflationary, and will never be useful as a currency for purchasing.
To be generous, the best case description of crypto is that it's a cryptographic ledger system for currency swaps.
But you're not wrong about its usability being awful for day-to-day purchases. Though I will say that most disallow a centralized entity from printing however much they feel like for "stimulus" and fucking everyone.
But everyone treating it like a security has effectively already given up on it as a currency. No one stashes USD under their mattress waiting for it to increase in value. Deflation encourages hoarding which decreases utility as a currency. Plus transactions getting more and more difficult as time goes on.
It's called a "currency" but really it's a stock like as in the stock market.
You could trade a stock directly to somebody, pay 1 share of nVidia for 1 cattle, but primarily you add one step of selling it for cash and trading with cash. Same thing with bitcoin. The 10 transactions per second harkens back to when the stock market had a trading floor and people shouting orders.
OP saying it's a pyramid scheme is like calling the stock market a pyramid scheme. In a sense, but stocks are also a way to preserve wealth since it tracks inflation (when a currency devalues the amount you can get for selling your stock increases).
Only with bitcoin you don't have to bet on the performance of a company. You're betting on the continuation of a 'bitcoin economy'. If there's a disruption of a global economy, networks, or trust in bitcoin you could lose your investment, but probably those things are less likely than the CEO being arrested for a crime and tanking a stock.