It's been more than 10 years. Where's the cool stuff that those supposed technology breakthroughs enabled?
I think we all know what the proponents would point to. Are we really impressed by any of that?
I am a disillusioned early adopter. The Satoshi paper blew my mind and I still have my letter from the Japanese court liquidating Mt. Gox's assets.
I have in fact looked at all of the things GP mentioned, hoping to find something that might get me interested again, unsuccessfully.
I just can't get excited anymore by people trying to do mundane, perfectly solved things, but this time with Blockchain.
Initially the internet was bulletin boards and poor quality online versions of print shopping catalogues, news articles with no images or low-res images, etc.
It took a while for internet-enabled capabilities to noticeably surpass things you could do by dialing an 800-number or mailing a cheque to a PO Box.
In terms of adaptation, once someone had access to a computer, with few exception people found some utility in their daily lives for it.
IMHO, folks who have access to crypto are not finding any immediate use for it in their daily lives. And further, it doesn't seem to scale very well. Sure, enough coins exist, but they can't be transacted without massive fees. Ergo, doesn't scale currently.
If some breakthrough solves the scaling problem while retaining it's decentralized nature, it may gain some utility.
Defillama had a list of the biggest apps, just work your way through the list. Or listen to the bankless podcast.
The sense of belonging being one of the hackers trying to fix the current issues with current systems. The issue is that many of them are indeed broken, but decentralization is not an answer to 99% of them.
What I love about the industry is that it really attracts a lot of cool and smart people similar to what 2000s internet used to be. I just hope you guys won't get REKT.