2. Everyone else seems to want to use the blockchain for wildly inappropriate applications
3. There's a small subset of people who have realized and monetized that adding the word "blockchain" will result in more money magically appearing
4. There's a fair segment that just want to use cryptocurrency to commit illegal acts and evade taxes (we're going to use Monero to run prostitution rings!)
There are some people doing some genuinely awesome things in this space, but for every person using smart contracts for low-cost electricity arbitrage, there's a dozen other people using ICOs to create distributed-blockchains-over-bittorrent that will use "machine learning" and "AI" to solve the unsolvable.
Throwing buzzwords in the mix doesn't create solutions, it only attracts dumb investors.
5. Proof of work increases energy usage, and increases the price of energy, making things like burning coal even more profitable than it should be.
6. Lack of regulation on online wallet holders. There is no FDIC on hosted coin wallets. Mt. Gox died a horrible horrible death where people lost tons of money, and even though it acted like a bank, there was no regulation on those hosted wallets.
7. Lack of regulation in the exchange markets. This allowed the rise of "shitcoins." (See "Shitcoin and Buttcoin": https://www.naturalnews.com/counterthink/Shtcoin-Buttcoin.ht... )
8. Coins are generally speculative in nature, instead of making their money charging for exchanging of money (like ATMs do) or to transfer money (Bank wire transfer). The business is built on hoping their coin becomes popular.
9. Blockchain has become a cult, where a large segment of society see the newly minted millionaires, and refuse to confront larger issues with blockchain in general. They literally have their reality distortion fields up to 11.
And it's also meant a lot of people who nothing about tech are starting businesses and projects revolving around blockchains and what not despite not have any real reason to use them or a need that said technology actually solves. So people here end up seeing these projects as the equivalent to 'Uber for dog walkers' or a 'distributed basket weaving platform'.
Oh, and maybe because the topic has been done to death already and people are getting sick of discussing it.
Blockchains attract people who know very little about computers or currency. You keep having the same discussions over and over again.
For instance there is the privacy maximalist who thinks Bitcoin is great because the U.S. government can't track his transactions. What he doesn't realize is that the blockchain is public so the U.S. government as well as the governments of France, China, Israel, Iran, organized criminals, extortionists, advertisers, spammers, etc. can all track his activity.
Are your addresses going to stay private forever? Are you sure?
And I'm totally not against the concept. This is definitely a "prove me wrong" moment. It's just that I've been looking for a long time, and so far, nothing.
On my case, I can see another one (for now): Namecoin, which is a decentralised DNS. I can't see any other way to build it apart from a blockchain, it's difficult to create a spam-resistant trustless key/value store without that.
The thing is - there were just a few of them, and none spectacular enough for me to remind myself about what it was right now.
I'm happy to be proven wrong, but I'm not going to be the one to going out of my way to prove it right.
Every single one of them would talk about how crypto was "changing the world" and "saving Africa's banking system" and all kinds of nonsense. But when I'd ask them if they or anyone they knew had ever bought anything with crypto besides other crypto, almost all of them said "no". Somehow this technology was changing lives even though they did not know a single person who used it for it's intended, non-speculative purpose.
In other words, watching the the whole crypto fad pass is like watching the British version of "The Office" - just painfully awkward to live through. From the outside looking in, it seems so clearly overridden with scam ICOs and clueless investors.
For example, a friend tried to get me to invest in an ICO for a "Blockchain Bank." The idea was that by using blockchain, the startup could offer anyone in the world a completely legit, low fee UK bank account - all without personal identity verification (again, because "blockchain"). It would destroy traditional banks AND PayPal!
When I asked very basic questions like how they planned to get around Know Your Customer banking regulations, my friend said "Don't worry, it's all in the white paper!" But I read the white paper and it essentially just said "we'll figure it out!" There was absolutely no explanation of how it would ever work. But my friend was not interested in learning more - they just wanted enough of an appearance of legitimacy that they thought the ICO price would pop.
These are the kind of lame startup pitches that would normally get laughed out of an investors office for having huge conceptual holes. But because they said "blockchain", people are lining up to literally throw money at them. It's not because anyone actually believes (or even cares) the technology will eventually work. It's just because they are afraid that they will miss out on quick returns on the immediate speculation of the ICO.
This doesn't even touch on the widespread fraud, currency manipulation, pump and dump schemes, etc, that infest the crypto world in general.
The point is that even if you are doing something really amazing with blockchain, now you have to rise above the general stink of the cesspool of the wider crypto world. Lots of people already have a pretty bad taste in their mouth.
Blockchains aren't useless. They're just a lot less useful than what they're currently promised to be.
It's easy money when your cost basis is only a few dollars, like mine.