I very much agree with your argument and I sympathize with your experience in trying to discuss crypto with newbies, they usually look at me with glassy eyes and say no thanks.

I think, they do not grasp where value comes from, and more broadly why "money" is worth anything.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend about Steemit and explaining how the system pays us for our content, and he was like where does the money come from, and to his credit he got that part, but then there was this "system-failure" moment.

I mentioned the platform is growing and its better than Youtube, Reddit, etc, and he was like soon they will start advertising, and then it will be just the same as the rest... I had to swing back to the beginning of the conversation, there is no "they", Steemit is a decentralized app, meaning that "we" the content creators, curators and members of the community run where it goes. So then he felt that it would never grow because big companies need ad revenue to grow... that to me was the cherry on the cake, I couldn't believe my ears! Of course that's not true, look at Wiki, or Bitcoin, or Steemit. These projects grow because people love them and put time into them, just as you were saying in your article.

It is the time we put into something that makes a thing worth something, really worth something. This is why fiat ultimately goes to zero because there is nothing behind it, just paper and a printing press, copy & pasting an image.