I think that question relies on looking at how any infrastructure that gets mentioned also supports the people gambling. And then it relies on "revolutionizes" to be a greater improvement than an arbitrary metric.
Reason I point that out is there are somethings I like, that I don't find comparable to other services and just convenient, not necessarily revolutionary.
For example, give me a cloud platform that has the same pricing structure for developers. The pricing structure is that I only pay once application deployment, and then get unlimited reads at any amount of bandwidth for free, and all my users pay to update my variables and database, instead of me. That's not the case with GCP, Azure, AWS and anything non-blockchain that I've looked at. I like that development environment. I like that the users are willing to pay and have an insatiable demand of doing so. I don't care that the same application could work at orders of magnitude greater throughput on other cloud systems when the users now have to be found and then go through a 12-step funnel to be convinced to use credit card rails. So that observation is going to continue attractive developers and their whole networks.
I enjoy the instant collateralized lending. That's revolutionary in the sense that the speed is light years better.
I enjoy the price discovery that allows for the instant collateralized lending.
I enjoy the free and standardized API access that allows for the price discovery.
I enjoy being able to chain actions across distinct services. Especially consequential financial actions, but also not necessarily.
I enjoy being able to simulate the state of the entire economy, to see what affects what. Since you can branch off of a blockheight and prod locally.
I like that there's enough people there for any of this to matter. I'm not someone that needs the "revolutionizes" and "a billion users" goal posts. I think its right for people to be disillusioned by crypto enthusiast's ideological claims. Its still financial services, merely because there are finances to service. The same as how the non-crypto financial services industry works (the largest industry on the planet). It doesn't have to have utility to you, it just needs to reduce friction for the people that are already there, and there are lots now.
This doesn’t require the decentralization or chains, just the same development environment and distributed use of it amongst many organizations. But without the speculation component and confidence in the system, that won’t happen, in the mean time this exists and its fine.
Yes, it is worth it. Crypto doesn't aim to solve what you just described about every market. Crypto has the same distributions seen in other markets and economies.
Crypto just lets you watch it in real time. The efficacy of its transparency selling point is actually at the crux of criticisms.
Whether its simple noticing there’s a big market for collectibles, but pretending crypto’s version of collectibles are uniquely speculative problems.
Or seeing that the cryptocurrencies have wealth consolidated in the hands of a few, as if that undermines something about an infinitely divisible asset, while the criticism is describing state currencies.
We can see the phishing attacks and hacks globally, compared to not being able to see and quantify that outside of crypto, we choose not to make an international headline every time someone falls for a scam outside of crypto.
The top 1% of the USA which you linked about is over 1.3million people. As opposed to fewer than a few thousand? And bitcoins can't don't inflate, so... those 2000 addresses (probably only 50 to 100 people, at most) own most of the bitcoins, forever. I don't think you realize how big of a deal that is.
its an infinitely divisible asset, and nodes can debate tail emissions all they want without any input from old holders. and it also depends on what you care about, what do you care about that makes you care about that? something about bitcoin being a universal reserve asset or something? because that has nothing to do with anything I care about.
Sure. Convince yourself that that an infinitely worse system is an improvement on a system that is already terrible. Either you are entrenched due to sunk cost fallacy, libertarian brain-rot, or you are naive. I hope the lesson you end up learning doesn't cost too much in the end.
The argument can go both ways.