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.
The value proposition of crypto is the ability to do a permissionless digital transaction. This was made clear to me in 2021-2 with the trucker protests in Canada. Their bank accounts were locked down, but they could still receive crypto.
They could still receive crypto, but for what purpose? The Canuckistanian dictator banned the banks and crypto exchanges from interacting with certain wallets. So while private transactions might still work, those crypto wallets were cut off from the system, in which case you might as well be dealing in bullion. Without the ability to convert crypto to CAD or make trades through the exchanges, it lost most of the benefits of crypto.
That's true. It's why I personally advocate for silver and Monero. Silver because it's good for daily transactions, Monero because a wallet can't be blacklisted.