What is its job? How often do you think goods and services are paid for with Monero? How often do you think the coin is used purely as a speculative asset?

It's certainly used far less often for small-scale, personal transactions. Businesses mostly don't support it yet. I'm hoping that will change. The only company I do business with that supports Monero is Mullvad, and that was only a recent addition. The media is certainly doing a good job of pinning the "Monero = bad guy naughty money" connotation to it. That connotation means it's doing its job though. If organized crime thinks it's secure and private enough, then it's definitely good enough for me.

I honestly can't answer the speculative asset usage part with any empirical evidence, but it seems to be used speculatively no where near as much as Bitcoin and Ethereum. I don't see crypto hype-guys chanting "MO-NER-O!" at all really in comparison to the other two.

Although those goods are predominantly illegal drugs.

When a cryptocurrency is mainly used for speculation rather than payment, it's a scam.

I don't crypto, but, isn't monero the coin whose primary intended use case is enabling illegal transactions by rendering them untraceable even to the police?

Are ... we calling that a good actor? Or do I just misunderstand what they're for?

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> Now that is hyperbole.

No, it's not. Hyperbole doesn't mean "thing I don't agree with" or "thing I believe is wrong."

The person speaking very clearly wasn't exaggerating and very clearly meant themselves to be taken literally.

As I see it, if any crypto wasn't a scam, crypto fans would have long since agreed to give that thing as an example. The fact that the entire "industry" can't come up with a single compelling example, a decade and a half and twenty billion dollars in, is about as clear and obvious a proof as is actually possible.