There were barriers to contributing to those efforts which simply don’t exist with this Web3 thing, so this vague implication falls flat if thought about. Orders of magnitude more individuals have the opportunity to meaningfully contribute to the advancement of the cryptocurrency space when compared to the early internet, without much (or any) need to wait for hardware innovations or military funding.
What is a good reason that cryptocurrencies have seen practically zero real-world adoption in the same approximate timespan that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et al managed to integrate deeply into our societies? And of course by adoption I don’t mean HODLing, I mean cryptocurrencies being used as the currencies they are claimed to be.