Let’s be brutally honest. At this point, nearly two decades in, there are still no—I repeat, no—significant legal use cases for cryptocurrency. Bitcoin, the supposed genesis of this revolution, was conjured in 2008. In tech years, that’s practically prehistoric—barely younger than the iPhone, positively ancient compared to Apple Pay. For 17 agonizing years, crypto advocates have shrieked from the rooftops that blockchain tokens will imminently displace conventional finance with widespread legal use cases. “Any day now,” they crow. Yet “any day” stubbornly refuses to arrive.

This isn’t for lack of trying. El Salvador, in a fit of national delusion, made a catastrophic push to ram Bitcoin down its citizens’ throats,…