It's more like blaming a water utility company that doesn't give potable water, and its supporters tell you "but you can always buy a bottle of water from the store. Or maybe dig for water yourself!".

Yes, one can build the "fraud prevention" and other measures on top of blockchain. But then you have a financial institution just like a bank, and you can drop the blockchain part - anything it "solves" can be solved much simpler and with 1000x less energy once you have the other trappings of a financial institution.

Neither the "full blockchain solution" would, once the fraud protection and other safety checks are added.

Which is the point I've made.

You can't simultaneously claim the benefits of blockchain being without protection, and respond to the criticism about the dangers with "it's just a toolkit, you can add protection in layers above". Or you can, but you're claiming the pros on both sides of a XOR feature set.

Outside of that use case crypto is a speculative investment vehicle. Maybe BTC will replace gold as a store of value. But that is just speculation.

Well, so is Git!

The big difference is that the blockchain requires all transactions to appear on all nodes, and has a wildly expensive and slow consensus phase.

Thing is, these two features provide great negative utility for the average person and no positive utility at all unless you are an anonymous entity wanting to transact with other anonymous entities with no legal framework at all.