CRYPTOCURRENCY

When Bitcoin was first emerging I was still at school. It seemed 
interesting, right up until I found out that just to set up a 
wallet you needed to complete a huge download which would have 
completely blown the family internet data quota and filled up a 
good chunk of my storage. Now of course I realise I just needed to 
hold onto some coin for a few years and it would have eventually 
increased in value enough to easily cover the cost of the internet 
excess and a new HDD. But even then I could only find places in 
Melbourne as the nearest to actually convert Bitcoin with AUD 
anyway, so the wallet probably would have stayed empty.

Plus investment wasn't really on my mind anyway. I was keen on an 
alternative to Credit Cards and PayPal, which had fees, and equally 
important back then, 18+ age restrictions. Since then, Bitcoin went 
insanely volitile and the trickle of services accepting it for 
payment shrank back again, taking my interest away with it. So I 
was slow to discover there are now "stablecoins", and PayPal even 
has one itself. In theory these do seem easier to use, except I've 
never seen anyone but my VPS provider accept them (and even their 
PayPal payment option has been broken for years (though I reported 
it to support), so I rather doubt that it works). Plus I've since 
developed misgivings about cryptocurrency which I've struggled to 
fully express.

Yesterday while I should have been thinking about more productive 
things I put it in some historical context with other means of 
trade, which I thinks highlights the issue:

Barter:
 Exchanging useful goods.

Early Physical Currency:
 Exchanging useful goods which can be exchanged for known amounts 
 of other useful goods.

Modern Physical Currency:
 Exchanging cheaply produced useless goods which can be exchanged 
 for known amounts of useful goods.

Cryptocurrency:
 Exchanging expensively produced useless concepts which can be 
 exchanged for known amounts of useful goods.

I feel like that last one has to be a step backwards somehow. I 
sometimes encounter the phrase "late-stage capitalism". Is 
Cryptocurrency something like "late-stage economics"?

 - The Free Thinker