The value that decentralized currencies offer is that they exist as an alternative. Because they exist and are hard to censor, governments necessarily need to toe the line or risk losing usefulness of one of their tools. Ethereum takes this use-case and applies it to other types of assets & services

Bitcoin is a system of incentives and rules that allows people who don't trust each other to coordinate and manage an asset for the good of all participants. Similar to how governments are supposed to operate currencies; if the tendency towards using currency as a tool of control wasn't so strong.

Crime is easier to track on blockchains (where every asset transfer is recorded in a public ledger into perpetuity) than they are in the traditional financial services sector where governments need to get a court order for every intermediary institution that processes asset transfers.

Despite trendy narratives about memecoins- the largest use-case that crypto has atm is for money transfers. People use it like venmo/cashapp in the States/Europe, and for cross-border payments to support family members living in other countries (this usage is dominant in Asia due to migrant pop.)

What rule of law issues here? It's legal to use crypto. There are obviously people using crypto illegally - just like there are people using the US Highway (examples: to transport drugs or guns across state lines) or the US Dollar illegally. Does that make highways or USD bad.

This is just the payments-related stuff. There's a lot of other useful things that crypto does/can enable which aren't viable in the traditional finance-straddling real world or digital economies as well.

With crypto I don't get charged overage fees if i accidentally try to send more than I have in my account. Don't have the fraud prevention at my bank accidentally block all transfers from my account until i go in person to a branch or whine on the phone. Money transfers are faster than ACH or wire.