It’s because there are a lot of crypto entrepreneurs (who have a vested interest in the thing) who talk about it like it’s the inevitable future of the economy, which is it’s own kind of exaggerating.

I’m not in the US so I don’t use Venmo, no.

Like the lemmyverse here, no currency is powerful until many people use it, so instead of resisting, which simply reinforces the status quo and keeps the companies in control, dive in and help grow the ecosystem, like you’re doing here!

I would hesitate to draw too many parallels between lemmy and crypto. Speech, ideas and social media is one thing, currency and transactions another, and I’m not sure applying the same philosophy to both is necessarily wise. Traditional currencies and banking have had centuries to work out problems; they may not be perfect but I don’t see a fundamental need to throw them away and shift massively to crypto. Of course I could be wrong, so I’m not against experimentation, but we do need to experiment prudently and be open to critique :)

Regarding your last question, I could ask those about cash. Crypto is a lot like cash, and if you lose it you’re kinda screwed. You just need to learn how to keep a hardware wallet safe.

True, which is why most people keep their most of their cash in banks: it’s more secure there and if anything happens you can always sue the bank if it comes to that. With a hardware wallet, what recourse do you have? Even if you take all the precautions you can, no system is completely foolproof, and as an individual it takes a lot of time and effort to do that yourself.

Well you could always try to give cash ;)

Snarky remarks aside, I’m not saying crypto is inherently a scam (although I do think it is more or less reinventing the wheel). I think it’s less efficient than fiat currency at this point since you need to convert your crypto to make much use of it. I can see your point about privacy protection given that transactions and accounts are supposed to be anonymous (although I have some privacy qualms about all transactions being put onto a distributed public ledger), and anonymity can be necessary if you’re suffering from persecution. But with anonymity, how do you prove your ownership over your crypto assets should you lose access to your account, or have it stolen? That’s a very critical drawback to crypto.

Then why not just give them money?

I think there’s a difference between upvotes and karma. Seeing upvotes on a particular post is nice. Having a score of the sum of all your upvotes and having it displayed to everyone is a different matter, in my opinion. I feel like it gets taken as a gauge of the quantity/value of a person’s contributions, when there are low-effort ways of gaining karma, hence the problem some may have.