It provides value to people who want to compute things on a public network that no single party controls. We can argue about whether or not that's a worthwhile thing for people to value until the cows come home, but I think it's beyond the scope of this conversation.

But point taken. I'll avoid using fancy technical lingo like "BFT" or "cryptographic" on hacker news any more.

Yeah, this "cryptographic" stuff is just way over our heads.