The biggest benefit is that you can only withdraw what you need into the real world, if you gain millions of dollars you can life off that money for the rest of your life with tiny withdrawals of $2000~$5000 or so serving as a stable stream of income which allows you to have risk free investment into real-world activites that would normally strain your finances and induce sunk cost fallacy.
Losing $5000 doesn't mean anything when you know that you will have $5000 tomorrow.
There are many types of crypto people. Some of them are not crypto people per se, but people who saw crypto as a means to an end. Among them, there are plenty of people who seem to be invested in sheer fraud.
It's also important to note that there are many sides to the scheme. There's for example the instant transactions side, and the long term bet in scarcity. For example, Russia has been leaning heavily on crypto to circumvent sanctions due to their invasion of Ukraine.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/08/russias-use-of-...
> In the end, it did produce a lot of rich people out of thin air, and I guess, served its purpose.
It was not out of thin air. This is literally a grift where the people holding the bag saw their money find its way to the pockets of those who got rich from it.
I'm not sure you understand how international sanctions work, particularly the scheme imposed on Russia.
For example, read up on Russia's rupee surplus
https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/india-russia-susp...
We all know that China for examples continue to trade freely with RU. There are many other examples of how Coca Cola sells a significant boost in numbers to border countries which are then driven across the border to RU. Everybody knows what is happening here, but nobody cares, business is business. Coke isnt the only one, far too many continue to trade even if its thru a middle man.
You can see a lot of vids on YT for example that show Russia supermarket shelves have more than enuff Coke and other brands, even though officially Coke is not trading with Russia in anyway.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/japans-taiyo-oil-rec...
google "dubai airbus spares smuggles"...
This is the key issue. Crypto by itself created little to no actual additional value. Especially when it devolved into just another centralized currency with less government oversight. So the whole thing was a zero-sum game. People only got rich because they made others poor.
Before cryptocurrency, there was no decentralized way to transfer value on the internet.