And as for enviromental friendliness, this is questionable. PoW, which is the only way to actually have a decentralized cryptocurrency suitable for global needs, is notoriously power intensive. So, there isn't any big improvement here over traditional financial infrastructure.
There is actually improvements to the traditional infrastructure; Bitcoin mining setups are power intensive but are heaily run on renewable energy, a recent report by
Coinshares research says that around 74% of overall mining power is gotten from renewable sources.
The Bitcoin mining sector also functions as the 'buyer of last resort', so rather then it putting a strain on energy consumption, it utilizes unused energy, hereby reducing losses and could be a major economic driver.
...any situation where man conquers its environment, making the environment more suitable for his day to day activities and creating new artificial features. Cryptocurrency is a typical example of possibilism.
It may not yet be conquering the world, but a system that gives user's; financial freedom, full control and (pseudo-)anonymiity, while having other unique qualities comes very close to it, imo. It's still a growing technology and there are lots of years to fix the issues in scaling.