Don't worry, I think the majority of HN readers essentially share your opinion. Possibly even the vast majority. The people who get downvoted are the ones who

Don't worry, I think the majority of HN readers essentially share your opinion. Possibly even the vast majority. The people who get downvoted are the ones who say cryptocurrencies - as a technology - serve absolutely no purpose to humanity other than scams, fraud, laundering, drug trafficking, and other criminal activity, as well as useless zero-sum speculation and shuffling around of funny money, at the cost of country-level electricity use dedicated solely to generating and hashing pseudorandom numbers all day. (Which isn't that far off the mark, but it elides the genuinely interesting aspects of the technological and cryptographic innovations, as well as the full potential of general-purpose decentralized smart contracts and all the current legitimate use cases. Plus the fact that Proof of Stake, if successful, basically eliminates the electricity and environmental problems.)