The positive utility of crypto so far has been negligible.

I have to say, it is on-brand for someone glibly promoting this to ignore knock-on effects. OS security used to be so much worse. And yet - viruses at the time were mildly annoying, or simply debilitating in-the-moment. They were a constant hassle. Now they’re a weaponized threat to the government and infrastructure of nation-states. That would not have been possible, without the incentives created by these slapdash implementations of cash you can e-mail.

They still suck for the purposes people wanted them for. I’ve been into this for a while. I had Beenz. I was a proponent of Bitcoin when you could still mine on a mundane PC. I’ve been explaining fungibility to people since before NFTs came along to illustrate what happens when you fuck it up completely. I’ve seen a thousand places where merely distasteful exchanges force people to use Paypal and then everyone at some point gets shafted by Paypal.

There are many obvious problems I would like this technology to solve. There are many unexpected problems it has obviously created. Our problems remain unsolved.

The functionality you’re championing is nice, but not strictly necessary, and plainly insufficient.