I'm going to address Bitcoin because I think most cryptos are scams at the worst, or unsustainable systems with poorly designed incentives at best. Speaking as

I'm going to address Bitcoin because I think most cryptos are scams at the worst, or unsustainable systems with poorly designed incentives at best. Speaking as a Bitcoiner, we all envision it as a medium of exchange. This is the goal, 100%. Some finance bros see if differently, but Bitcoin is money. And if you spend any time on research, or reading any of the top Bitcoin books (there are many), you would know the Lightning network is the answer we advocate. Bitcoin isn't deflationary, but it is disinflationary. The money supply grows at a predictable rate until it will eventually stop growing. The idea that you need inflation to be a viable currency is a sort of fever dream delusion that economists tell each other to justify their own terrible inflationary policies. The argument is that you need your money to slowly lose value to encourage people to consume and to keep the velocity of money up. But that is a ridiculous argument on its face because if the argument is "consumers won't consume today if they think the price will go down in the future" then the opposite argument must also be true: "producers won't produce today if they think the price will go up tomorrow." It's an entirely self defeating argument, but that gets ignored in macroeconomics classes, and most people don't think critically enough to question it. The reasons that Bitcoin isn't a great medium of exchange yet is because: 1) There's not enough liquidity yet because it's a relatively small market still. 2) The payment layer isn't fully developed. Both are changing, however, and changing quickly. The monetary policy of Bitcoin has already ossified, and no one could change consensus rules if they wanted to. This makes it the soundest, hardest money we have. It is already a long term store of value. Network effects have taken over, and are probably on a runaway track at this point. In order to break this process, you will need to break the network, which you likely can't do. People will continue to use the network and acquire Bitcoin. Value will accrue to the network. Eventually, it will become so valuable that merchants will start preferring Bitcoin payments. This is when it will become the medium of exchange. You say this is a "greater fool" scam, but actually, we are just seeing something we haven't seen before in recent human history: the bootstrapping of an entirely new money from nothing. This is how it happens. It starts as a store of value, then transitions to medium of exchange, then becomes a unit of account. That is the order. We are nearing the transition point from step 1 to step 2.