The people who invest in crypto are rent-seeking parasites hoping to extract value while incidentally providing liquidity to the Chinese miners blowing non trivial amounts of co2 in the air. The people who transact in crypto are actually building it and working towards the crypto dream of alternative currency.
It's important to understand that when a company sells a stock, they get money that they can then use to grow themselves. So there is generally some of the principal "retained" in a unit of stock, particularly because the unit of stock also creates a legal relationship with the company.
By definition all crypto starts from a miner, so when you buy a unit of crypto, you are transferring money directly to the miner. So the unit of crypto retains none of the principal investment.
That is an absolute terrifying property.
I am not quite sure what I think of ETH yet, since it's a little different, but BTC is straight bad for the environment.
There are also arguments to be made that alternative currencies not controlled by a centralized government are an important endeavor. If governments have a monopoly on management of currency, then it can be expected that they abuse monopoly power. The distance between policy and reality can be measured in suffering. The idea of a non centralized currency is that there is just the market and the reality of the market. Systemically enforced reality is an appealing property.
The government inflates a currency to (regressively) tax idle money while simultaneously de-valuing debt. That's not necessarily a good thing. It allows for unsustainable largess and directly creates boom and bust cycles. Here's some good fun from the last recession: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk Here's a pretty unsettling video about inflation and geopolitics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8
Just as a disclaimer, I am a complete layman when it comes to finance and economics.
