Imagine a regular, government-approved bank that only stores (government insured) deposits. If its only "job" is to store money, and it obviously can't operate for free, people have to pay for the right to store their money there. Weird bank, but easy to understand. People pay monthly fees for storage boxes and could theoretically store cash in it, for example - obviously no interest growth in box-money. In Europe they have had negative interest rates at times, which is essentially the same thing to a bank that costs money - in that regulatory environment, people pay for that government backed security of their money. Just because a bank uses EUR and not USD does not mean its bad, or invalid, or whatever.

In crypto, it is a similar thing, but obviously without government insurance. To secure the ledger, you pay for it. It is paid by the holders and given to miners to secure the ledger (via deflation and tx costs). Its a similar idea. People find this distributed blockchain security to have value, so they pay for it.

This should so far be easy to see parallels. People find value in the security, there is just a different provider and regulatory environment, but in both cases people pay for that security. You may not value one kind or the other, but do accept that some people somewhere values each of them.

With this framing of the value provided by the blockchain, don't think of cryptocurrency like a typical stock market type trading. You can think of it more like currency. We legally treat it like a security (in US), but understand its value-proposition is more currency-like.

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> Obviously some people are converting the crypto back into cash and buying real estate with their gains

Yes people usually convert it back to fiat money to buy things like real estate. Not always, but usually. Nothing is absolute. Think of this like a European person taking euros to America. Most of the time, they'll change it to USD before buying things, but maybe they find a person in America who wants EUR because they're selling their American home to move to Paris. The EUR economy in America is small, and so is the BTC.

> those gains come from the losses of other people eventually. Crypto has no cash flow.

When you trade stocks, people buy/sell the security, and in theory the act of the business conducting itself (profits, etc) should impact the value, eg by generating a dividend or increasing share value. Therefore, overtime the market becomes worth "more" because more economic activity is represented by the shares. Therefore it is not a 0 sum game. In a rising market, the market increases in value (positive sum).

This is not crypto. That is true, but this doesn't mean it should all be thrown out.

Crypto gains are generated at the expense of others. That is also how FOREX trading works, and people do that and its not controversial to most anti-crypto people. Speculative investing is not something I'll push for or attack, but people seem to want to do it, but it is not a good or only reason d'être for crypto in my opinion.

These financial transactions can sometimes be improved with more complex financial engineering. At times, is way more accessible with crypto than traditional financial institutions.

International transfers are another crypto use that is common. There is no inherent reason that a blockchain has to be used to perform this, but somehow in this world it came to be that crypto is one of the cheapest ways to move money overseas.

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TLDR: Crypto has a different value proposition than you think it should, and yes, it has value to people. Also speculative trading is not everything.