This is unfortunately how people get into the habit of thinking all crypto and blockchain is a scam - because a huge numbers of scams and silly ideas are indeed running in the space...

What would you say is the ratio of genuine crypto innovation/research/companies compared to scams? Considering the signal-to-noise ratio, I don't think it's that weird to just say "it's all a scam anyway" since that rule of thumb actually works extraordinarily well. Unless you're talking to an expert or having a deep dive you've gotten the point across correctly.

I’m not sure what it is, it might be as high as 99-1. But the 1 is pretty incredible. Look at fxhash on Tezos, it’s created something truly incredible in generative art.

What's an actually useful, not-contrived use case that crypto enables that isn't otherwise possible _for the average resident of a stable/wealthy country_?

I work in crypto since a little while, and have following the tech since 2014 or so.

I’m still really skeptical of that trash fire going anywhere. Including my day job.

I can only thing of one application, and it still have to deliver:

Providing mesh network of wifi, LoRA or 5g where the node are administered by individuals.

The nodes are mining a proof of coverage. And effectively being payed to deliver a service ( providing wifi/LoRA/5g coverage )

The nodes cannot trust each other, and having a decentralized ledger help them split the bill and compensate the nodes for their work.

In my view it would provide a “last miles delivery of coverage”

I have a few project in mind that I won’t mention here. The crypto they are using is not subject to much speculation.

That my favorite use of that tech stack. ( since the decentralized land ledger projects seems to not go anywhere )

Kind of baffled that nobody has mentioned this yet, but:

Buying illegal drugs online

(I am hugely sceptical on most things crypto) generally speaking the view of a rich, stable country might make you blind to some real use cases because you just don't have them. But for people in less privileged countries having a permissionless system of digital dollars is actually extremely useful. Also my pet theory is that Bitcoin MIGHT suck money out of the property market and make home ownership more affordable.

Decentralized Identity for individuals and devices.

I've found the images here to be a good quick and dirty summary: https://www.gsma.com/identity/decentralised-identity

Maybe I'm just dense, but this seems more like a centralized identity more than a decentralized identity. Which, if you lose, like I have with various wallets I've had over the years, seems extremely sketchy.

there isn't one. but by the time people realise that a few unscrupulous people will have made a ton of - fiat - money out of the gullible masses.

NFTs have proven incredible for indie digital artists across the world, but particularly for artists from the third world where making a living off them is a bit easier. There’s a huge honest indie art movement on the Tezos NFT space.

Good places to look around in: Fxhash (amazing generative art market that creates uniques through interaction between the code and the blockchain) Hic Et Nunc (now multiple sites, fully decentralised art market) OBJKT (sort of a better UI for Tezos NFTs, same stuff as in Hic).

What does NFTs add to this that couldn’t be achieved by FXHash hosting ownership status in a PostgreSQL database?

It has been like this since the beginning.

The space is in dire need of regulation. Sociopaths go for the lowest level of effort with the maximum level of rewards. Right now making a dumb crypto token and shilling it is likely the easiest immoral way to make money in this world.

There was a similar trend in 2017 I think, but it died off with the bear market. It has scents of the original dotcom bubble. Slap a .com extension on your brand, collect the cash.

KODAKCoin (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KodakCoin) seems to be the most literal 2017 parallel to this: old, nostalgic brand scooped up and used to rent legitimacy for a silly coin scheme.

It’s weird how amnesiac the crypto market is, it feels like everything is a rerun these days of something we lived through just four years ago.

That was the first one I thought of as well.