Not to be too cheeky here but paying with what? Cryptocurrencies are mostly hot potatoes everyone is throwing back and forth and occasionally dropping to catastrophic effect, and don't seem to be tied to actual value add.

Meanwhile millions of people pay for tools that are now integrating AI to enhance their value add.

Free ChatGPT is just a loss leader for API and paid acct and a way to better train the model.

not really, crypto has value as determined by the markets.

Most people who own crypto exchanged dollars for it.

What you describe is price, not value. Things may be priced high but have little value, such as in cases of asset speculation. Things can be priced low but have great value, such as the value of human relationships, knowledge, etc.

I think being able to spot where these diverge is really important to understanding the world and where we should spend our limited time on it.

True but in comparison to every other value crypto is the only one which doesn't have any alternative use.

Gold, shares etc.

I believe the criticism is correct as the current driver of crypto is either a 'i put that much money in I'm not selling until it increases again' or gambled los.

After all the miners want to get paid.

But hey binance and others struggle let's see if there is a collapse soon

IMO the value is in the globally distributed, battle-tested secure/resilient payment network.

It's not.

The trust issue is real, china's great firewall is real and the crack down of sec is also real.

And without anyone exchanging your bitcoins no one cares.

And I'm comparison to our fiat a ton of critical features are missing like money laundering.

Or scammed them from other suckers.