Love it or hate it, institutionalized fiat currency has value because the issuing country has people with guns who will drag you off to a metal box if you don’t use the currency in the intended ways (unless you’re super rich I guess).
Yes, 100% agree on this!
The cryptocurrency industry collapsed because the idea at its core is a Ponzi scheme. It doesn’t matter how you implement the Ponzi scheme in software. The only way to accrue value is to bring in more people who are willing to pay more money for the currency than what you paid for it. That’s the literal definition of a Ponzi scheme and is inherently unstable (it crashes the moment the of rate of incoming new users slows down).
That’s the problem, people saw cryptocurrencies as way to make money quick (classic money making problem), it’s not that the idea of cryptocurrency is a Ponzi scheme, is that people are using it to engineer Ponzi schemes or do fraud with it as they do with fiat money.