Cryptocurrencies offer no benefit over holding stocks in companies.

All cryptocurrencies are pretty much the embodiment of a speculative bagholding investment scam, so much so that the owners of said coins have come up with memes like "Buy & HODL" to poke fun at themselves and others for knowingly trying to get other people into the scam and to buy their coins at a higher price, so that the new owners have to find new people to sell their coins to, etc., untill the bubble bursts. Either that or they're willfully ignorant to the possibility of the value crashing and losing all the money they put into it, i.e. they're the suckers who got caught "holding the bag".

Cryptocurrency basically only has a few use-cases.

1. a meme coin to talk to your friends about and/or discuss, for whatever reason. In this case they basically function like any type of tradable "thing" backed by some type of pop-culture phenomenon. Comic books, baseball cards, Star Wars memorabilia, Beanie Babies, etc. Just switch the roles. Now it's the coins themselves that make the "money", and the users create the memes that back it up and make it worth talking about (like DogeCoin).

2. Use for illegal activities online. Cash is the best "anonymous" currency for gray/black market activities, from drug dealing to prostitution. But if you want to order drugs over the internet, it's far better to use bitcoins or alternatives. So you're basically speculating that the government won't shut down these sites (like SilkRoad), or you're buying them for your own personal usage of acquiring drugs/prostitutes/whatever other illegal thing you're into. Which is fine by me, do what you want, but don't try and sugar-coat what the actual use case is.

3. Used to scam people. The smart/well-financed people who start these coins are the only ones who benefit, and it's done basically as a way to scam people out of their USD in the first place. Like, if bitcoins are so great, why would any be for sale? Why would a holder of bitcoin ever sell them for USD unless they were truly desperate? Wouldn't the number of transactions be super low because of how "valuable" bitcoins supposedly are?

If you're scared that the US Government is going to crash and USD will become worthless, then you should be a prepper, not a bitcoin trader. And in that case you're much better off storing ammo and ammo manufacturing equipment, since that would be much more valuable if the economy crashes. And the odds of the US economy crashing that hard are basically non-existent; the US Economy survived the last economic crash which was one of the worst ever.

Which is why you're way better off purchasing small pieces of companies in the form of stocks/bonds, since that's a security that's backed by an asset that grows as the economy grows. Some companies may be overvalued, but that's another post. Also, I hope this is popular, if not I'll post on r/unpopularopinions.