The Internet provided solutions to technical problems, regardless of any societal/political considerations. They may have resulted, but as a secondary effect.
When theorizing about societal/political benefits, take into account the societal/political problems cryptocurrencies created by inventing a machine that allows converting resources directly into money of miners' digital wallets without regulation.
Your sending any amount of money, actual practicality and realizability aside, comes at the cost of a lottery, where miners perform literally 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 computations per second whose outcome is completely thrown away, unless they are lucky enough to be one of the 6 computations per hour that win. This cannot be made more efficient: If computing one hash costs less energy, the difficulty will be adjusted to require more calculations to keep the target of 6 hashes per hour.
By the decentralized property of cryptocurrencies, it is by design not possible to regulate where the energy for this lottery is coming from.
When theorizing about societal/political benefits, take into account the societal/political problems cryptocurrencies created by inventing a machine that allows converting resources directly into money of miners' digital wallets without regulation.
Your sending any amount of money, actual practicality and realizability aside, comes at the cost of a lottery, where miners perform literally 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 computations per second whose outcome is completely thrown away, unless they are lucky enough to be one of the 6 computations per hour that win. This cannot be made more efficient: If computing one hash costs less energy, the difficulty will be adjusted to require more calculations to keep the target of 6 hashes per hour.
By the decentralized property of cryptocurrencies, it is by design not possible to regulate where the energy for this lottery is coming from.