> Crypto is successful at being money. If you don't believe me, then I'm happy to sell you the laptop I'm writing this on for 1,000 ETH instead of 1,000 USD.
How about 1000 kilos of gold? Or 1000 1 Carat Diamonds? Does that make diamonds good money?
> Right now, you can take out a loan without involving a bank from one of the many crypto lending protocols.
Yes, but you over-collateralise that loan, swapping tokens around to do so. It doesn't look a lot like lending, it looks more like obfuscation of naive/fraudulent claims of productivity mixed with a game of musical chairs. And right now loan platforms in the crypto space are in all sorts of trouble. Look at "Solend" which appears to have suffered from a large token-holder taking out loans as a way to exit a cryptocurrency that was traded too thinly to cash out directly.
Multiple DeFi lending platforms are mid-collapse, right now.
I really agree with this -
> In other words, crypto's use case is the one that it claims: decentralization.
It's just that that use-case is far less universal, useful or desirable than we have been lead to believe by the cryptocurrency hype factory. For the most part nobody cares, the people putting money into cryptocurrency just want somewhere to gamble, the people not into that aspect are not lining up to use the products of this space, because of that promise. And in many cases (irreversible payments with no oversight!) it's actively bad.
> "after 13 years, there are still no use cases for crypto" is not a rational fact
How about "after 13 years there are still no use cases for crypto that aren't done better without the crypto aspect, or aren't just fucking stupid to begin with?"
Because sure, there are some things you can do with blockchains and smart contracts, but honestly, why the hell would you?