When you strip away the noise, crypto's real power boils down to a few fundamental things: you actually own your assets—no intermediaries, no gatekeepers. You can move value anywhere on the planet without permission. Every transaction creates an immutable record, so you can trace exactly where things came from. That provenance layer? It's everything. Bitcoin and Ethereum didn't just create new money—they proved that decentralized networks could preserve truth itself. That's still the killer feature nobody can replicate in traditional finance.