In a way Letterman absolutely had great points: you don't need to watch baseball on your computer, you have a radio for that. You don't need access to this information via a computer, you can use magazines for that.
Looking back on this almost thirty years later, what was missing is the limitations and the consequences.
Yes, you could use your radio. But you were limited to being able to listen to certain times, or certain places. And only baseball and maybe a few sports.
Yes, you could get that information, but only through the magazine.
What the internet did was lower the barrier to this. 30 years later, and I can watch esport championships hosted in South Korea months ago, for free, after my kids go to bed.
And what were the consequences for print journalism?
I think you need the same idea for evaluating crypto: yes, you can obviously do many of the things crypto can do, without crypto. But what are the limitations? And what will be the consequences?
As I said elsewhere, permissionlessness and effeciency. Consequences are that you no longer need to be high frequency trader to transfer large amount of value with low cost.
Similarly, now if you want to transfer very little value without cost, your options are to be within same bank or telecom operator as your receiver. Or watch an ad.
Imagine you could transfer 0.5 cent internationaly every minute or every page load for no added cost. What kind of service would that enable? Content monetising without ads, one example. Censorship-free hosting as a service, the other one.
Ok, but the argument against it here seems to be: "I don't really understand it, haven't tried to, and haven't bothered to use it. Therefore it's dumb and has no use case."
You're david letterman.