Sure. I participate quite frequently through calls, donations, and voting.
But I'm not sure if you've looked at the news lately... we're pretty far into "too late".
Non-violent protest movements have a great record of creating real, and sustained change. Whether that's in India, or the civil rights and gay rights and suffrage and abolition movements here, peaceful protest is a powerful way to send a message to the people in your governments what you and the rest of the people there support and expect of them.
It's a great way to meet folk, to get good energy, to get a message out, to get a little exercise and fresh air, and to support your causes in an effective and, relatively light time commitment manner.
> With crypto, a software flaw used to steal crypto can kill an entire company.
This is mainly with Smart Contracts or Hot Wallet Storage specifically. A bug in a Smart Contract can be detrimental considering that it's code is immutable. A Hot Wallet could be misconfigured or exploited by a remote attacker. This is why it's important to use cold storage methods for larger amounts of funds, typically using a paper wallet, or even memorizing the seed phrase as a last resort. If you're an institution, then you should be employing institutional level security (though, I don't really see this happening as often as it should). You can even employ segregated witness to divy the funds amongst contract holders.
> They're largely powerless to stop it once the transaction has gone through
That's pretty much the entire point. This isn't a bug. It's a feature. It's up to the end user to determine the execution of the transfer of value from one to another on the ledger. The ledger can only ever be written to; making it immutable.
> With crypto, a xss attack or a misplaced password can cost me all of my coins.
I mean, this can happen anyways, even with the current system. If you get phished, click on a redirect, execute a payload locally, or whatever. Not really sure how this is even considered a cryptocurrency specific issue; It's a fairly universal issue as it is already. Also, you're more likely to see something like this with anything utilizing a Smart Contract.
> With crypto, I have to triple check the address I'm sending coins to because I can't undo it.
Well, not if you're using QR Codes. Remember those? They've been around for awhile. I would do this with my Account and Routing numbers if I'm wiring money or setting up a direct deposit regardless. I find my self checking the numbers to make sure I get paid. Even though the bank can reverse it, it would still be a pain. Knowing I can't reverse a crypto tx makes me a bit on edge, yes. It's, again, a feature... not a bug. If you have that much doubt with a transaction, then you should be using QR Codes instead. I personally find them to be convenient. Otherwise, I'm putting the public address in my clipboard and pasting it and then checking the first 6 and last 6 hex symbols. If they match, I'm happy.
> With crypto, I have to spend what's sometimes a significant amount of money just to complete a transaction, and transactions can take minutes or hours to complete.
The more congested the base layer of the network becomes, the more likely the fees are to be driven up. Bitcoin has a side-chain called the Lightening Network to mitigate this while focusing on processing micro-transactions. You can basically send 10 Sats for the cost of 1 sat. Some tx are basically free because of how the network is setup. With Ethereum, the base layer can process upto about 15 tx/s. Bitcoin is about 7 tx/s. Lightening can process up to 100k+ tx/s. That's 4 times the speed of either Visa or Mastercard. If you're executing a smart contract on the Eth network, then things can get expensive because you're using gwei as gas to execute the smart contract which is used to deter bad actors from abusing the EVM. Solana can process a 50 tx in about 500 ms which is impressive to be honest.
> I think there's a future in crypto but we're in the dotcom boom days of it where most of the value is in speculation (and I suppose illegal purchases on the darknet). I'll wait for crypto 2.0.
Less than 2% of crpyto is used for criminal activity and that's mainly because you can get caught using it. A lot of people believe that it's completely anonymous when it's not. You're usually KYC'd somewhere and the only way to avoid this is to do direct p2p transaction without having it linking back to something that's tracable. Bitcoin is a criminals worst nightmare simply because it's a public ledger which anyone can audit.
> their usage as currency will be limited unless the inefficiency problem is solved.
This is common point that's brought up as well and was in the article. In PoW, this inefficiency is not a problem. It's Bitcoins network security to maintain it's own decentralization. It's the base layer and you can build on top of it to address the transaction speed as well as the network congestion; Lightning Network being a prime example of this as a potential Layer 1 solution to Bitcoins Layer 0 solution.
I feel like alot of people are missing the forest for the trees. I've done my research. Have you?
From there, it opens doors to working with towns and eventually the state.
States have the power to override Federal laws in greater numbers.
This is by design. If you dont understand how your country works, the systems that run it, then you will fail.
Awareness helps, but it rarely changes things. Participating in the democratic process creates the potential for change before it's too late.