I feel like there's so much nonsense happening with crypto that people will overlook any of the legal, ethical use cases of it. Like its got lower inflation than gold, I mean that's actually incredible from an economic standpoint.

You have a good point, the value of any money (even a lot of gold's value) is a social construct, i.e. only what the population makes of it. For that reason, I don't think that crypto is inherently bad, but the fact is that most people trading aren't using it as money (you know, an intermediate good to facilitate trades), they're attempting to use its wildly fluctuating value to make a quick buck. Those types of trades ironically only make it more volatile, and are what made it volatile in the first place, so there's now a vicious cycle. Will crypto ever stabilize? Fuck if I know, I'm not qualified to talk about this, but frankly I think you could say the same about most people in the stock market and especially in crypto. Maybe if a critical mass of people start actually using cryptocurrency as a currency it'll change, but who can say.

A pretty generous comparison. USD is at least FDIC insured and somewhat tied to our country's finances. Crypto only stabilizes around the markets that use it, i.e. black markets.

technical details vary and honestly matter little. what matters more is what people do with these things, and that's what's explained

Its just an entry in a ledger. It says something like, "blandfordforever sends courageousstep 1 coin" along with a cryptographic signature from blandforever that validates the transaction. This means you now have and can transfer that coin to someone else, provided that you have the key to sign the appropriate transaction. That's all it is.

The miners are all competing to sign a "block" of transactions onto the ledger by figuring out new correct answer to a math problem that's determined in part by a number from the previous block. They are rewarded for this by being able to send themselves a preset number of coins in this new block they've signed. Transactions aren't final until they've been added to the blockchain by this mechanism.

A central part to it is that each coin is defined as a series of transactions, not the other way around like with real world items. For example if a new Bitcoin is mined, that's described as a transaction from no-one, to someone.

If your interested in learning more about the math behind Bitcoin and how it functions at a lower level I'd recommend reading the original white paper for it