I agree with you on the “currency” aspect, had my issues with that at first too, but effectively you can think of it as points or credit or kudos within a network as well, as the only thing that makes most of these coins “currencies” is that you can use them to exchange value in their respective networks. The real store of value is not the coin, it’s the underlying network.
The mechanics that are built around these “currencies” matter a great deal as to whether they will lead to a mere conversion of existing wealth distributions onto the chain or whether they may challenge the system as such.
The US Federal Reserve printed some 40% of all USD in circulation in the past 12 months. The ECB was even worse. We are told that inflation is at 2%, but if you look at commodities prices, real estate prices, the price of oil etc, inflation is MUCH higher - easily in the double digits. Effectively central banks are diluting the value of your work and earnings at a shocking rate. This doesn’t matter much for people with big money, as they are likely to be invested broadly and hence just ride the inflation wave upward. But it matters a great deal for the “middle class” (if that still exists) and below. In a way, holding cash is worsening the distribution issue more than anything out there right now. And if you invest in stocks to beat inflation, you are still tied to the economy dictated by central bank policies, so effectively you remain part of the problem. However, with a few Cryptos (and Bitcoin in particular), you “remove” your dollars from direct fiscal control of a centralised federal reserve. I highlight bitcoin because it represents a particularly good store-of-value (due to its mechanics) that enables anyone to side step the effects of such irresponsible fiscal policies.
Furthermore, fiscal policy is often used to manipulate entire nations and leverage foreign policies - bitcoin is decentralised and is much harder to leverage by governments in foreign policy. So far over a trillion USD have been committed to the Bitcoin network. That’s a HUGE deal. You try to remove 1Tr USD out of a fiscally centrally controlled economy in any other way and watch the war machinery kick in.
The heavily skewed distribution of wealth we see around the world is a direct effect of financial capitalism and its power brokers. Blockchain technology paired with organisational models based on the metaphor of the network are one encouraging pathway to wrestling some of that power and control out of central functions with denominated power towards a more collective, decentralised emergent power.
Yeah, that’s a real risk as always with new technologies. That’s why we should make an effort to appropriate and apply this new technology into scaled infrastructures run on mechanics and ethics that have a chance to counteract this sort of hijack rather than stare at it passively from the back rows (not saying that’s what you advocate at all :)). But I agree, the same technologies could be used to enable some form of fascist-techno-capitalist distopia, similar to how the great decentralized, liberating promise of the emergent internet in the 80s/90s has been leveraged by governments to increase surveillance and central control.
