[ralfn]

It wastes entrepreneurial energy too, since it doesn't actually provide value to anyone.

Not the way a car, a phone, a hairdresser, a movie or Google maps does. The economy is just what everyone does/make. Think of the opportunity cost of all that human resource being wasted on a pyramid/ponzi scheme, which does not produce any value. It only redistributes it, poorly. Yeah thanks. We really need more gambling infrastructure with even less oversight.

If we would make a list of important things we want to explore further, how would crypto be on it? Why?

It's ok as a storage of wealth, but the amount of investment money and energy wasted on this stuff. And in the end it's going to bankrupt gullible idiots that put their pension in dogecoin. Maybe in the US you just let these morons starve, but in the most of the world, you wouldn't. So it makes sense to protect society against having to bail out suckers from a completely useless and pointless economic exploitation.

So I can imagine banning on on the sheer notion the existence is a net loss for society.

[RestlessMind]

There was no value to WWW and HTTP in 1990's. Yet hackers tinkered with those technologies just for the sake of doing something cool and here we are 3 decades later. I see the same spirit with DeFi, NFT, dApps and Crypto in general. And just like there was a crazy boom in the late 90's (pets.com anyone?), history is rhyming again (dogecoin anyone?).

What is sad is that some of the top comments on hacker news are dismissing this cool new tech by choosing to focus only on the negatives.

[dantheman]

Getting out of fiat currency, is clearly a value