May I give a little more hope my friend. I know what you are talking about. I have been battling with this problem from way before cryptos came into existence. And yes, the flickering of hope that the coming of Bitcoin and other cryptos brought was extinguished pretty soon for the very reasons you mention above.
What we need to devise is a completely independent decentralized facility, not connected to exchanges for transferring dollar wealth to crypto wealth, or the other way round, as that makes it vulnerable for financial attacks, exactly as we are experiencing now on the crypto market as a whole.
It needs to be something that exists on the internet, or the dark net, if need be, or on a net of it's own, should that be possible. It must be a closed market on which only living individuals can have accounts and can trade real goods and services, in a no more illegal fashion than next door neighbors can trade whatever they want to directly across the fence between them.
I have been a member of such a system, called The Cape Town Talent Exchange for twelve years now. It has only grown since I joined, spawning a number of equivalent systems world wide. Please have a look at it. You may be pleasantly surprised!
Trades are done in terms of it's own token called the Talent. The value of the Talent is protected by there being a limited number of tokens in circulation. I am not going to explain exactly how it works - I am sure you will enjoy investigating that yourself, should you be interested in finding out more about it. Point is, it works and it has been working just fine for more than a decade that I know of, no taxes, no interference from government, just enabling members to trade whatever the feel like trading, starting off with nothing more than an internet connection and registering on the system.
In spite of its success, the CTTE has a few drawbacks. It firstly runs on a local central server, serviced by a human. So do clones of it, wherever they may exist. Setting it up on a blockchain will spread the load and make it more secure.
The main drawback, however, from a total community perspective, is that the CTTE is only useful for actively productive people. And in order to break away from totalitarian control we have to create an independent economy like this, that includes the whole community. We can't leave the 60% non-productive sector of society consisting of the too young, the too old, the students and the disabled behind, to be used as leverage against us.
I am sure you can see where I am going at this point, so I think this will suffice for now. I hope following my past and future posts on this subject will bring more clarity on exactly how I think we can succeed in setting up a system like this.