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Using this logic, you could defend bank-robbery. Still your overall premise was "eventually making society better", an ideal which you seem to abandon in the passage above. I find it revealing that you cannot enumerate any value added.

Indeed, I could. But there's a serious difference. It's not merely a matter of not seeing the "added value" of bank robberies - it hurts real people.

As to "value added", I find value in people pursuing and achieving their wants without notable harm to others or demanding resources from others, no matter how little those wants matter to me personally.

gig economy work doesn't overlap much with regular work.

...except that it does. (Here giving you as much proof as you gave me.)

The two primary recent gig economy jobs are transportation in markets with severely restricted transportation options (such as ride hailing cartels), small internet-accessible tasks that couldn't be paid for before, and delivery services for goods that didn't have delivery services before. Things like Uber, Mechanical Turk, and GrubHub. There's very little overlap with most real world jobs where the gig approach wouldn't make sense and would be heavily regulated.

And that's an important thing to note. Removing oneself from gig economy work is pretty easy to do - vastly easier than quitting a traditional job.

...At least until all the traditional jobs have vanished and been replaced by gig work. In the end it all seems to boil down to master/slave relationships, but, hey, that's okay if all the contracts are in order, ...right?

If that were going to be a genuine problem, it would have happened long before now. Gig work has been around forever. What's changed is that we have technology to apply gig work to roles that are otherwise poorly covered, just as I noted before.

In other words, there's value where there was none before. That's typical economic fabrication (in the non-deceptive sense of the word) of value.

Here you are being intentionally obtuse. I used "fabricate" in the sense of "lie about" rather than in the sense of "create". Please elaborate on how HFT differs from graft.

No, I'm merely playing on the double meaning of fabrication. Now, let's consider the definition of graft. Here's a typical one [wordnik.com]:

1. Deceitful or fraudulent use of one's position, especially in public office, to obtain personal profits or advantages.

2. Money or advantage obtained by such means.

So what's deceitful or fraudulent about trading really fast? Or even of placing and removing book orders that fast? (They can after all be traded when they exist - even if it's just for a microsecond.) Nothing at all. So right there, HFT isn't graft.

I'll not argue further about crypto. I suspect there may be some value in having a convenient means of barter outside of traditional currency in the event the SHTF - perhaps better than the liquor and tobacco I am stock-piling for that eventuality. And I certainly would not refuse any offers anyone would like to proffer for an NFT of my next journal on SN. :)

I'll note here that Canada attempted [soylentnews.org] to use the financial system to shut down a protest (the trucker convoy thing). I don't know how far along they were, but crypto transactions [reason.com] would have still gone through. Getting cut off from normal finance by a hostile government is the sort of SHTF moment that I think would make crypto very viable.

In truth, your response makes me think that Azuma may have a point, and that your promotion of these technologies has an ulterior motivation.

Like what? There's no point to me trying to defend myself from vague innuendo. Azuma crosses the line to complete fabrication, in the deceptive sense of the word.