True, but it's entirely possible that such a use case will never materialize. People haven't even been able think of plausible theoretical ones except in niche applications. That's not to say none are possible, but they're hiding pretty well.
My personal hypothesis is that the interesting tech in crypto will eventually find a real, solid use -- but it won't be one resembling what anyone thinks, and won't be sexy.
Hard disagree. DAOs already exist, for example, and they are widely used even if the phenomenon is unknown to who doesnt have an interest in it or who is not technical enough. They are still way too technical for the average user, and even solely this use case could easily explode the moment everything is simplified and presented to the users with an intuitive and easy to use interface by a new service.
A lot also depends on the infrastructure improving - IPFS is great, for example. But its not as fast as a server, forcing you to store very little data using it. For the moment, any use case that will involve IPFS must fit into those narrow confines. Actually, same goes for most of crypto - Ethereum is a framework that you can literally, actually program on. But you wont be compiling any complex modern app code and serving it from there. One reason why the use cases still revolve around financial things, NFTs and other things that are built on the ledger functionality.
> but it won't be one resembling what anyone thinks
That's entirely possible.
> and won't be sexy.
And that totally depends. Anything that gets mass adoption ends up 'sexy'...
To be honest even an example of a DAO that only votes on token allocations but has spent them on something more useful than a book about Dune would be interesting.
Are there any DAOs that do something that's NOT entirely about crypto things?
That will be difficult until crypto is improved to have the user friendliness to allow non-crypto-savvy people to use crypto services. Even the very act of 'getting a wallet' is a high bar to entry for the majority of the population, leaving aside 'connecting it to something' then using the still-complex crypto features like DAOs.
They're also a pretty niche application. And I'm not convinced they're something that requires blockchain to accomplish anyway.
> Anything that gets mass adoption ends up 'sexy'
Not if it ends up being an invisible piece of machinery, which I think is the most likely result. Different bits of the more interesting tech will get incorporated into larger systems to support their goals. The larger systems may (or may not) be sexy, but the bits of crypto they incorporate will just be background players to that.
But then, the surest way to be wrong is to predict the future. Who knows what will really happen?