The Web hit the scene in 1991. By 2003 how we shopped, worked, consumed media, communicated with friends and family, and interacted with information was in the process of changing radically. A million "little ambitions" to replace catalogue shopping and how hotel reservations were made were transforming how the world worked.

Bitcoin hit the scene in 2011. By 2023 crypto's mostly a failed get-rich-quick scheme with a couple actual possibly legitimate uses that you can see if you squint just right.

So not only did crypto have much smaller goals than the Dot-Com era, but it failed pretty hard at those goals. And the deep dark secret at the heart of crypto is that — apart from the get-rich-quick stuff — it's neither particularly interesting nor useful. And it takes a lot of set dressing and hand-waving to make it seem like such.