What is Utility in Crypto?

If you have to boil down blockchain technology to its core essence, it's a ledger.

This is why Bitcoin naturally took its narrative to be a way to transact value. Because, what else can you do with moving immutable tokens around between addresses?

A ledger is all finance is at its base. Everything built on top that is more or less a ponzi scheme, as crypto has proven with every utility narrative in the past, and our debt-based banking system proves by continuously kicking the can down the road for the next generation to deal with.

Now, the new utility narratives in crypto are revenue generating protocols. I'm not going to deny there is value in Hyperliquid. The house casino making money off people gambling is one of the earliest businesses formed after the invention of finance.

But, it isn't really utility on crypto, at least not yet. You're relying on different countries' laws to determine whether them paying you a rev share is allowed. Right now, I'd argue HYPE doesn't actually have any utility because rev share payouts are illegal, and you're making a bet that this will change and that the team behind HYPE will honor the community.

If you ignore any narratives about what will happen in the future, crypto really has no utility outside of being a store of value.

Another narrative today is real world assets (RWA). You can own assets from the old system of finance now on the rails of crypto. This is just totally backwards in my opinion. Because what we've done is use crypto to put a layer on top of our old layer finance. When crypto is supposed to be the layer underneath. Fractional shares and 24/7 trading isn't anything novel. You could build it in the old system if you wanted to, and if settlement is still happening on the old system's rails, then it's not actually cryptocurrency in my opinion. You're just allowing traditional finance to weave its outdated tentacles through the network that was supposed to resist all that.

I feel most of crypto is woefully misguided and doesn't understand what crypto is actually about. Everyone's repeatedly falling for attaching our old system's ways of doing things into crypto.

Before downvoting me, which this subreddit seems to do if you talk about anything other than utility in crypto, I ask you to think about this deeply.

Value is what people decide it is. That is the only reason any token, stock, or real world asset has ever had value.

The actual utility of crypto if you remove all the narratives is that it allows people to form currencies and trade fluidly without any centralized institution. As soon as you introduce centralized institutions, the entire point is lost. This is why Bitcoin topped at $120K in my opinion. It became a community of suits, co-opted by Wall Street, and the main narrative and entire point (value) was lost. Bitcoin went up rapidly because it was against the system. As soon as it became apart of the system, there's not much reason to own it over the S&P500.

It pains me to see crypto taken over by traditional finance and all this nonsense. It is supposed to be a way for the people screwed over by centralized institutions abusing debt and inflation to take back power.

Bitcoin looked like nothing on the surface to people who didn't understand it. While invention of blockchain tech was crucial, I'd argue it wasn't so much about the utility as it was about a generation ravaged by the Global Financial Crisis taking back power from an abusive banking system.

I think this is happening again in crypto for the first time in a long time. It has never been more exciting, if you take off the utility tech blinders off and pay attention to the things that might look like nothing on the surface, but are actually greatly decentralized and stirring up people to unite. It might actually be the next generation's way of taking back power.