Adam Ludwin, the CEO of Chain, talks about how when the dot-com bubble happened, everyone knew at least to an extent that online retail would be a thing. Social networks would be a thing. Digital media would be a thing. The required ingredients were competition, Moore's Law, and time.
Bitcoin is different for a few reasons. It doesn't solve economic problems for most people in developed countries. It's also a development far deeper in the technology stack, a change in ledger management and accounting procedures. The last major update to this was double entry in the Italian Renaissance, which allowed the formation of corporations. The one before that was the invention of zero.
We don't know what the implications of Bitcoin will be. I think a much better analogy for the current bubble is the South Sea Company, since that was essentially people speculating on a new asset class (equity) that was poorly understood at the time. But saying that it's a bad investment because the use cases are not immediately obvious misses the forest for the trees.