Crypto is actually really useful for buying drugs and other illegal products and services. People have legitimately made a lot of money as well if they weren’t falling for the stupid scams. You should see the price of BitCoin or Ethereum these days.

Not saying it’s ethical to run a lot of these given their limited usefulness and very high costs. But saying they didn’t make people money, were all scams, or didn’t have a use is objectively wrong.

Would people on Lemmy actually know the difference though? Like half the people here don’t believe in the premise of money and capitalism to begin with. How are they expected to understand the finer points of business?

Normally the people talking about water use have no idea what they are talking about. Normally data center cooling is closed loop, much like a cars cooling system. So they don’t use significant amounts of water at all.