As We May Think[1], anyone? Or self-driving cars, which go back to at least 1984 in CMU, and yet are still "[near] future tech" now. Neural Nets were a half-century old idea[2] before they became actually useful...

I mean, the question is not "Is Bitcoin as implemented by following the original whitepaper going to be the future of mankind?" It is whether or not there is something big in that whole area (blockchains, decentralized tokens of exchange, PoW/PoS/etc) and, if so, how big?

Of course, for a lot of people, the question is "By, say 2025, is my BTC going to make me rich or is it is not even going to be worth the bits it is encoded in?" Equally hard question to answer, but much less interesting.

The current cycle of blockchain furor could all end up badly (I hope it doesn't, but who knows), and yet that won't mean the tech has no future. Now, it could be like VR/AR/AGI, which are always the future, of course ;)

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

[2] McCulloch, Warren; Walter Pitts (1943). "A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity". Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics