So is liking/hyping a new technology for the sake of it (or for the sake of getting rich).
The Satoshi protocol is not about money.
It is a distributed, trust-less consensus algorithm. Finance was just a good candidate to start with.
But we can expand that much further.
Some strange examples I hear about how this is silly:
"You can't have a smart contract act as an employer because it doesn't exist" But neither do companies? They're an abstraction that we agree exists, enforced by law.
It needs to be enforced by law because of the issue of trust.
But if I have a mechanism that removes trust (merkle trees) then what's the issue? The contract will do what it states it does because that's the only option it has.
Granted, it's a touch utopian and I'm not advocating for setting this system up tomorrow. But it's absolutely an achievable goal
Remember when ethereum forked, because a smart contract many people cared about actually specified something different in its code than what the humans intended it to mean? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)
The problem I have with this line of reasoning is it does not consider the interface between on chain and real world realities. Some of it is easily doable, like money (if I have a token I have a token), but many are not at all easily doable like land use. I can write I have a piece of land on the chain but that does not give me any control over it. If I have to bring in the government to enforce land usage then why not let them do the owner tracking too? If they disagree with the blockchain its not like I can do anything about it.
That it is cool is I think pretty much accepted by everyone. The objection there being just because something is cool doesn't mean we do it especially if its at the detriment to the planet we live on.
That it is useful? If you have time, please make that case. To avoid having a flamewar over it, lets try to be concrete and cite an actual project (even if in progress)