[samsonradu]

> How does this actually benefit anyone?

There’s real benefit when we consider the amount of man-hours spent the past years on trying to reinvent finance, with little success so far.

These (smart) people can use their time and skills towards more productive stuff.

[chii]

> These (smart) people can use their time and skills towards more productive stuff.

But if society really believes that their smartness could have been used better, why aren't they paid for doing "more productive stuff" than crypto? These people did crypto because it paid the most. Therefore, at the time, it must mean that it is most productive to do crypto.

[samsonradu]

I guess society is not optimized for max productivity. As a group, society makes many resource allocation mistakes and (hopefully) corrects them later on.

Fe. society might have been better off investing in nuclear energy in the past 30 years, yet it did not and it s starting to look as a mistake.

Circumstances play a role too. My opinion is that if it had not been for the pandemic and the economic anomalies that happened way fewer people would have paid attention to crypto.