Sure, but shuffling units around is the starting point of a new financial system. I like to say that DeFi is speed running the creation of a financial system from scratch. Storing value, trading currencies, borrowing/lending, derivatives, insurance, etc. are some of the building blocks of a financial system and all are currently live in the Ethereum ecosystem.

I think some people got sold on this false premise that cryptocurrency would reinvent the entire world, build a new decentralized internet, etc. etc. And then they miss what's actually happening, because it's just "boring finance stuff". This is actually really important stuff that's being built.

I'm very skeptical of crypto but I'd say buying drugs online is probably better done with crypto than with fiat. It's probably the only actual use case that isn't speculation, and it probably dwarfs any legimate use as a day to day currency.

But even then, all the new cryptos are usually totally useless for peer to peer, private transactions since they merely piggy back off the ETH/Binance/etc chain. They often don't even support p2p transactions at all, and are now openly designed just to be hodled or dumped through exchanges

Monero is pretty old by now, but it's still the goldstandard when it comes to security/privacy/opsec, and darknet markets are slowly starting to phase out even BTC (which is a total opsec disaster considering how traceable it is) in favor of Monero.

Algorand is a fairly underground project I've been following, but it basically has taken the good stuff from Ethereum (smart contracts, token-izing) and combined it with the possibilities of Chainlink, along with having a ridiculously fast chain and simple ecosystem. Give them 3-5 years they'll be leading the CYO token space. ETH is increasingly falling behind as they can't get ETH2 out the door and Algorand already has all of it built in along with an incredible competent and politically connected team.

Agree though, smart contracts are where the future lies in many of these projects. Tough to pick up but where I'd be if I were a SW dev.

I think limited scaling so far is one reason for that. With limited transaction space, only the high-value transactions are worth paying the gas fees, and mostly that's people trading stuff around looking for profit.

I'm hoping that when rollups and sharding get tx/sec into five figures, there will be more room for other sorts of applications.