My current view of crypto is that it's a very novel technology in search of a use and so far it hasn't found one that is either important to a lot of people, or that it is actually good at solving. This is why a lot of the pro crypto arguments follow a pattern I call 'kitchen sink' arguments. Crypto is a novel technology, it must be useful for something. Maybe it's good at being a currency, digital assets, smart contracts, stores of value, decentralization of something, etc, etc.
It's interesting to unpack these. In many cases the thing exists already, minus the decentralization. For example, we have digital assets today. I have digital loot in my video games, but that's not what crypto people mean because it's not decentralized. They imagine a world where your loot from world of warcraft can follow you into fortnite, or something weird like that. It turns out this is both very hard, game companies can't balance the economies of their games if they can't control them, and people don't really care that much about it. It turns out they want a fun game more than they care about decentralized loot.
This may seem like a trivial example, so let's look at a more serious one. Today most dollars are in fact digital. They're just records in bank's traditional databases. Digital currencies already exist and work fine without blockchains.
This leads us to the important question, what benefit is crypto? The big “benefit” offered is typically decentralization, but I don't think this is a benefit at all. First, banks help people avoid bad things. In crypto, if you lose your key, you lose your money. There is no remedy. With a bank, if you lose your password or your atm card, or whatever, you can still get access to your money. Score 1 for traditional money.
Second, if someone gets you to give them your key and they steal your money you have absolutely no recourse. Your money is gone forever. This has happened to many tech savvy crypto investors. Can you imagine if regular people used crypto how often they'd lose their life savings! Score 2 for traditional money.
So what is the benefit of decentralization? First, it's important to recognize that modern money is already decentralized to some degree. Bank A doesn't have to coordinate with Bank B unless money is passing between them.
Putting that aside, the most common arguments for crypto are censorship resistance and immutability. No government or corporation can freeze your account, reverse your transactions, or seize your assets. Code is law. The blockchain is immutable. No central authority can override the rules.
Unfortunately none of these claims of decentralization are actually true. The guarantees evaporate when “they” decide it's inconvenient. In 2016, someone exploited a vulnerability in The DAO (a major Ethereum project) and drained about $50-60 million worth of ETH. The Ethereum community faced a choice: stick to the “code is law” principle and let the hacker keep the money, or reverse the transactions to return the stolen funds. They chose to reverse it via a hard fork, effectively rewinding the blockchain and undoing the hack.
So much for immutability. It turns out decentralization doesn't apply to everyone. When enough money was at stake for the right people, the supposedly immutable blockchain became mutable. The decentralization benefit that crypto advocates tout simply disappeared when tested in the real world. Now ask yourself, who made this decision? What voice do you have with the people that can change the blockchain? In the US we have a democracy where you get to vote for the people that make these decisions with respect to the dollar and you know who they are. What do you have in crypto, an un-elected and often unknown group of decision makers that have no accountability to you. Score 3 for traditional money.
This is the pattern with crypto, it's a solution looking for a problem, and when you examine the problems it claims to solve, either the problem doesn't really exist, people don't care about it, or crypto doesn't solve it better than existing solutions.