there are isolated cases of useful things done with some of the top names in crypto.
El Salvador helped break the backs of the international money transfer companies charging usurious prices for a simple ledger entry.[2]
Cardano is helping to build projects that are corruption and coercion resistant[1]
I'm sure others could come up with examples.
What has been unreal is the bubble though. People have tried to get rich quick off these things, meaning the use and utility value is much less than the speculative. Some of these projects have brought millions and maybe billions of value, but collectively maybe even now they seem to be over priced.
People are doing useful things with public distributed databases and cryptography as well. Unfortunately it has been largely overshadowed by the greed. This is an artifact of human involvement.
Mathematics implementations and new data storage paradigms are still our friends here at HN. Aren't they?
El Salvador helped break the backs of the international money transfer companies charging usurious prices for a simple ledger entry.[2]
Cardano is helping to build projects that are corruption and coercion resistant[1]
I'm sure others could come up with examples.
What has been unreal is the bubble though. People have tried to get rich quick off these things, meaning the use and utility value is much less than the speculative. Some of these projects have brought millions and maybe billions of value, but collectively maybe even now they seem to be over priced.
[2]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/09/el-salvador-bitcoin-move-cou...
[1]: https://africa.cardano.org/