Why are you optimistic about Bitcoin Cash and Crypto?

I'm not very involved in cryptocurrency. I had some of it a while back, and I'm not really sure why this sub is still invested in Bitcoin Cash. Although I'm not an expert, I have a good understanding of how Bitcoin and blockchains work, so looking at the whole blocksize debate with the knowledge I have now, it seems laughably stupid that 1MB blocks ended up having any support.

I know Bitcoin was always a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, so it really confuses me why BTC would have any value when it's almost unusable. I've looked into Lightning Network, and the idea seems ridiculous in the sense that there's no way I could see it realistically scaling to global levels of throughput. Inbound liquidity will always be a fundamental issue regardless of how many of the other problems with routing are circumvented.

If we look at the current state of the market:

• An unusable shitcoin is the market leader (and worth $70k a coin, while being very volatile, yet somehow considered a "Store of Value")
• 2 memecoins (which aren't even attempting to try an innovate or bring anything new to the table) have a market cap of more than $15B
• 2 centralized shitcoins (BNB and XRP) are in the top 10 in terms of market cap
• Tether still exists and nothing has happened to it, despite them being a very sketchy organization
• 3 of the top 10 coins are Proof of Stake (The reason I find this ridiculous is because PoS is a flawed consensus system that inherently relies on trust when the incentives very much aren't there)

From the information above, it's hard for me to take crypto as a whole seriously, so I'm not sure why anyone here would. People here are right to point out that Bitcoin is unusable, but to me it seems like Bitcoin Cash hasn't gained much market share for a few reasons. Namely:

• While Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash was the original use case that got Bitcoin to become popular, it's not the use case that makes it popular now. The culture of crypto as a whole has very obviously changed, and it seems like there's some new trend or another that causes a brand new shitcoin to rise into being one of the top coins
• The market obviously doesn't seem to value decentralization in any way, shape, or form, and I don't think it really ever will. Most people don't really care for decentralization itself, they only care about usability and being able to make profits/money. If they make enough money, they eventually don't even care about usability either, because most don't intend to actually use it in commerce and are usually very happy and content with the status quo (that is, using cryptocurrency in custodial accounts and banks like coinbase)
• The market doesn't really care about utility. 2017 proved this in my opinion. Most people see crypto the same way they see stocks, an investment vehicle to get rich quick, despite being proven that cryptocurrencies are a terrible investment due to their volatility (cryptocurrency subs have to literally post suicide hotline numbers when there's a bear market).
• Even if the market did care about utility (and usability for payments), it doesn't give much of a value proposition for Bitcoin Cash (or other digital cash cryptocurrencies) when it comes to sending and receiving money because:
  • End users still have to deal with the banking system when they actually want to receive their money in cash (because that's what is useful, due to the very small economy of cryptocurrencies)
  • Trust and centralization is not much of an issue for most users because if one company tries to block or censor payments for users, there are plenty of competitors available in the free market
  • People don't care much about being custodians of their own funds because they prefer banks to hold their balances and ensure that they are safe in the case of a fraudulent transaction or theft

This is all not to mention the fact that Proof of Work is wasteful, and bad for the environment, even though it seems to be the only consensus system that actually works and is decentralized. I don't mean this to hate on any crypto, but the way I see it, the space seems more like a circus than anything.