The negative reaction is _due_ to HN being a technology-heavy forum: the blockchain field is a marketing invention and divides into two camps: Merkle trees, which are useful but not new, and everything else, which is uncompetitively reinventing commonplace concepts with language designed to attract speculators’ money. For a decade, salespeople have been showing, repeating marketing points which don’t hold up to much thought, and hammering the “use your money to make me rich” message, so it’s not surprising that it’s hard to get attention with the same spiel now.
Put another way: after 12 years, huge amounts of money and attention, where’s anything clearly better than its predecessor? (For the user, not the seller) That’s considerably longer than it took for the web to have a huge impact on advertising, sales, dating, travel, banking, research, job hunting, etc. despite much lower barriers to adoption. Someone trying to invent a new DRM system to make signed prints isn’t remotely close.