Cryptocurrency is less then that. Cryptocurrency is expended energy. You can't use a cryptohash for anything. Whereas I can melt down gold and make earings with it.
What a bizarre opinion to have on an IT website. “Software is worthless, it’s just expended energy, you can’t use it for anything, whereas I can melt down gold and make earrings with it”
Think of it this way: if you turned off all the Bitcoin nodes tomorrow, and then later on a bunch of people said "hey, cryptocurrency would solve this issue for us!" - is there any reason for them to try and bring back old Bitcoin wallets in order to deploy it? No - none. They just fork the Bitcoin codebase, rename a few things and start a new network.
Bitcoin the software implementation which is already free is valuable. Specific wallets, bitcoins etc? Not at all, and not reusable.
A failure of imagination to do something useful with crystalized math is more a commentary on the failure of imagination vs. the utility of math.
If you compare any esoteric financial instrument against the melted rock utility test that you mention, the laity will err on the side of melted rocks.
"A failure of imagination to do something useful with crystalized math"
I don't think I could possibly describe BitCoin as "crystallized math". It's not like it is somehow convertible into some useful solution to some other math problem. It's a solution to a math problem that is essentially designed to not be useful for anything else on the grounds that said "utility" would be a potential mechanism for cracking the hash algorithm. (e.g., if you built a "hash function" that also provided a solution to some isomorphic bin packing problem, your hash function would have the weakness that the correspondence would reveal a lot a lot of theoretical bits about what was hashed.)
Besides, even if it is "crystallized math" than said math is independent of BitCoin's utility itself. If it were that useful you could go compute hashes until they have large numbers of zeros on the front all by yourself, without having to be involved with BitCoin. Since nobody has any conceivable use for such a thing as evidenced by the complete failure to do so, I have no idea what you think you're saying here. Merely working really hard at some computation does not make that computation useful for any other purpose.
Cryptocurrency is less then that. Cryptocurrency is expended energy. You can't use a cryptohash for anything. Whereas I can melt down gold and make earings with it.