dx1

You can program anything up to and including judicial oversight and interaction rescission into a smart contract. Not all existing laws make sense or have a positive effect on this ecosystem. Many have a negative effect, speaking from experience.

I will not be able to convince someone who's stubbornly ignoring everything I'm saying. Go waste someone else's time.

You can mimic any existing setup for tracking deeds and similar, or invent new ones, with the added quality that they can't be doctored. Once something is recorded, it's recorded for good.

What do they "make"? They control for the risks in social economic interaction with potentially adversarial parties. Ethereum is proof of stake, it doesn't burn up tons of fossil fuels. And the contracts aren't subject to human interpretation after being authored, they're deterministic at the protocol level (save for the entire network deciding to revoke the contract).

Why are you making fundamental mischaracterizations of the technology while acting like an expert? What you're doing is dishonest.

What is your prediction for what will become of it, though. GDP growth stops and people start bursting into flames? You know we've actually observed this before, right?

Now, if you do mean "capitalism" not in the plain definition of "an economy based around private ownership", but the more specific version where control of capital is highly centralized - there's some truth to the idea that economic decline can cause people to start looking to reform that system. True of any system, really, because people generally don't want to see their quality of life decrease. But that's very different than an economic system "requiring" it to function.

Capitalism does not "collapse" with 0 or negative GDP growth. I don't know where people got this idea. You only really see any sort of "collapse" if the social structure breaks down - the basic behaviors of trading continue even in extreme crises, insofar as a society operates with property assigned to individuals like that. Not counting "bubbles" and such as a "collapse".

Unfortunately our own pensions and such are also getting wiped out by the same forces. And with less access to insider information.

Yes, work. Smart contracts are designed, programmed and, if they're done right, rigorously audited for correctness. Then you have user-facing interface and everything surrounding that as well. Look at the documentation of AAVE, for one example.

And this isn't even getting into the protocol level (L1 or L2) work either. Bitcoin was relatively simple, Ethereum is not. They've spent years crafting these systems to function for PoS, L2 support, sharding, rollups, etc., at scale.

Anyone else see Reddit's stock tank 20% yesterday?

Yes, for the limited subset of ERC20s or whatever you describe as "ponzicoins". Things that actually do nothing, particular not doing anything more than L1 cryptos but "this is yet another token", are not really adding any value. But I would be really surprised if you can name any more complex contracts than ERC20s (or ERC721s), which is where the work in the space actually goes.

I reckon most of that already is. A real estate escrow smart contract is maybe 200-300 lines long in Solidity, depending of course on what it supports (contingencies and such). You may want to actually go look around, because there's I don't know how many millions of lines of Solidity already written. It doesn't all get as much publicity as NFTs.

"Greatest fool" description relies on the precept of its utility or demand returning to zero in a near-future timeframe. If people have utility for "the thing", that won't be the case.