I was nodding my head along (fantastic answer) until the stab at crypto.

Let me offer a (partial) defense of crypto if I can:

Broadly, crypto is divided into crypto-currencies and applications.

Let's tackled currencies first, some of which some are reputable and some of which are grifts, but which viewed in their most favorable light attempt to be a form of currency or asset that is decentralized. This means that no single party may unilateraly devalue them, or restrict their trade in any way.

(No I understand if that doesn't excite a lot of people, but this is clearly valued by some people!)

As may be obvious, crypto-currencies are too volatile to serve as actual "currencies", so they are at best "assets". But it is possible to use these assets as collateral for the minting of stablecoins. I'm not sure this is quite risk transfer, but it essentially relies on the willingness of some to hold speculative assets to enable the creation of a stable assets.

In turn, these assets are not typically useless — they hold value because there is demand for them to pay for transaction costs on blockchain.

Blockchains themselves are not useless. We may not think much of the difficulties of transferring money, but it is a real challenge in LARGE swaths of the world, where people are unbanked or live under tyrannical governments. I would argue that even in the west, the need becomes is becoming more pressing (Trudeau freezing trucker supporter bank accounts, banks imposing tons of restriction on cash withdrawals and "large" bank transfers).

Beyond transfer, they also serve to run decentralized applications. People are quick to dismiss those, and true it doesn't enable to do anything dazzingly new. It simply enables you to do things you could already do, but in a way where no single party (or even colluding parties) can shut it down. This may seem silly, but I think the world would truly be better if we for instance had a YouTube where copyright trolls couldn't strike down / demonetize legimate content.

Applications then. In reality, we're still far from decentralized YouTube (but we will get there). Most applications today are financial. And I think they're quite useful. The financial infrastructure being built is genuinely novel and useful.

The problem is that it is navel-gazing at the moment: that infrastructure is mostly used to perform financial operations on crypto tokens themselves. But there is no reason that they couldn't be used for other assets.

In fact this is starting to happen: you can now invest in real estate and US treasuries on the blockchain. We're still a way from mainstream adoption, and that has mostly to do with legal uncertainties that prevents established players from diving in (though many of them are experimenting). There are also entrenched interests there, it must be said.

So if anything else, crypto helps build a better financial infrastructure.

It's somewhat ridiculous that when you buy some stock, the trade is routed through three intermediaries and is only really settled 7 days later. The abstraction on top of this is actually leaky, with each intermediary coming with some risk and some agency to throw a wrench in the works. As in fact happened between Robinhood and its clearinghouse (or some such intermediary) during the GameStop frenzy.