"Zero" is not fair only because the total sum effect has definitely been negative. Ignoring all the ponzis, frauds, scams and rugpulls, you can't discount the massive amounts of wasted energy.

> as it's clearly being used more and more for legitimate purposes such as zero fee international money transfers and providing a more cost-effective option for merchants compared to credit cards.

All of the major cryptocurrencies are pretty terrible at zero-fee money transfers, given the fact that none of them have zero fees and have laughable bandwidth. And that's not even considering on/offramp fees for turning crypto into usable money. There's very little proof to actual adoption in ecommerce, since most merchants "accepting crypto" actually accept money, there's just a middleman that does the conversion.

And for most people sending money overseas isn’t a use case at all.

Crypto is a solution in search of a real problem to solve. A Rube Goldberg machine to do elaborate things with no (legal) point.