Okay, so for the foreseeable future: "The practical utility of crypto is such a joke when compared to the intended use cases that all of the speculators fawn over"

Not really a change in semantics here. It's still the point that crypto promised a LOT of really cool things for fintech that realistically won't materialize for a long time.

Like what?

With the recent defi boom and the increased trust and popularity in oracles serving off chain data I'd say that you can find a cryptocurrency project for most promises.

Not being popular or adopted is another issue.

Always just around the corner, just like functional PoS. I won't believe it until I see it.

What do you want to see?

Here's a list of Ethereum nodes that are staking 32 ETH, attesting blocks, getting rewards and slashes: https://beaconcha.in/validators

Roughly $5.6b in value staked, with no particular expectation date for being able to withdraw. That's 2.55% of the total available ETH.

Also, layer-2 systems in production now can handle several thousand tx/sec, without usability or security compromises.

Then perhaps you should look at the numerous functioning proof of stake projects that exist?

I'm the top 25 market cap there's:

BNB (powering the Binance Smart Chain) DOT (Polkadot) ADA (Cardano) ATOM (Cosmos) EOS TRX (Tron) NEM

100k transactions per section w/ serializability and all of the other things required to satisfy real-world concerns like fraud and regulatory constraints?

Today: several thousand tx/sec in "rollups," just by compressing transactions to minimal information and using zero-knowledge proofs that everything is valid. That's in production. The same transaction data is available on chain but e.g. instead of a sig on each transaction you have a compact proof that every tx had a valid sig.

Later: data sharding, where you're doing the same thing but each Ethereum node only has to store a portion of that data. That will multiply rollup capacity by 23X.

Details from Vitalik here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html

Last thing a "crypto" user wants is his account being put on hold for months for various reasons (i.e paypal style), usually "for his own protection". I believe it's a mistake see crypto payments like a replacement for visa/mastercard. It's good to have some competition.

Bold of you to assume that the crypto-crowd have seriously taken fraud and and consumer protections into account. Crypto-currencies are a poor technical “solution” to a socio-economic problem, and while this remains the case associated problems (regulatory constraints, etc) will continue to be things that are relegated to the “don’t care/won’t fix/too hard” basket at worst, and stapled on as an afterthought at best. That’s before we even get to the hardcore libertarian mindset that is incredibly prelevant in crypto-currencies.

It's more than that, they view existing outside the reach of the legal system and consumer protections as being a benefit. "No chargebacks" is a major selling point that the community uses to evangelize to merchants, and the flip side of that is that it's much less protections for consumers.

Except projects like TrustSwap exist.

The Internet doesn't have built in mechanisms for regulation or fraud and nor should it. Cryptocurrencies obviously don't solve the problem, but can be used to create a stricter set of guarentees than the current sustem.

> regulatory

https://register.fca.org.uk/s/firm?id=0010X00004U9vVAQAZ

> fraud

https://trustswap.org/

Just to name two examples. Cryptocurrency like cash won't stop you from falling to fraud or illegal activity but communities and regulations could enforce a safe subset of projects with stronger guarentees than the current system.

That's a completely theoretical max with 64 shards of the whole network, and reconciling those shards is an unsolved problem