Crypto has a far lower ratio on utility/speculation than other wasteful computations. Deep learning is changing the world in many visible ways (with a whole lot of speculation regardless).
What visible ways? Machine generated photographs? About as useful as NFTs...
I can, right now, send liquid assets to any human being on the planet with an internet connection without asking a financial institution, government, bank, payment processor or phone company for permission. That's utility, that's changing the world in a visible way.
You make it sound as if financial institutions and banks didn't have a purpose. There is far more negative utility in this. Governments, banks and financial institutions prevent tax fraud, apply workers' rights, redistribute money, etc. Of course they're not perfect. In that case fix your government, not the money system.
I get that financial systems have a purpose, I'd argue there's far more negative utility in them. They have positive effects, but a lot of their utility is not to protect people, but to control them to someone else's benefit. If they protected us without attempting to control us to the benefit of others, or brazenly looting us for our labor, nobody would be trying to build cryptocurrency in the first place.
