man even if you're not a believer in the utility of it all, simply participating in crypto right now is loads of fun. Its a weird space where finance and culture and tech and design come together. For every fraudster, there are 10 people who are genuinely excited about this space and have a true hacker spirit.
I haven't seen that kind of energy on the web in years - so much of it is cleaned up and coporatized. Crypto is still wild and interesting and fun.
You can even consider entering it purely as a hobby - that's how I did, and ended up talking to developers about, say, creating undercollateralized synthetic assets that hold peg to their real world assets by constricting/increasing asset supply at timed intervals.
After reading your use cases I do have empathy for people in those situations, where governments and centralized agencies are corrupt etc - just not entirely sure this solves any of that.