1. This is really cool! How amazing! We can do so much with this.
2. User activity drops off fairly quickly.
3. Oh they want money? Lets wait until the trial expires.
4. Not renewed.
They weren't realistic enough for sales (we tried), and all other use-cases seem a bit forced
But hey, they're growing and acquiring revenue (I think?) -- so who am I to question
Like the other trends we'll need for the marketing to die down and see what is actually real and useful. Once we hit that point the money is gone, no more crazy funding. It will also be interesting to see if we get helpful products that makes our lives better or if it's going to be damaging as we've seen with social media or relegated to the backrooms, like crypto-currency.
None of the technologies we've seen trending like this is good or bad on their own, but social media has been completely misused and rather than providing value and promoting human interaction it's used to track us and sell us stuff we don't need. Crypto-currency was, in hindsight, never going to be something that could be promoted to the average user, but is really useful as a backend technology. The current generation of LLMs have the possibility of been incredibly harmful, or extremely useful, but they aren't products in their own right.
Regarding the marketing hype, I think this video from der8auer at CompuTex was funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45CvTHmt_dI basically the AI label is just slapped on EVERY THING.
The only question is if AI has reached the "peak of inflated expectations" yet (in this case it's really high).
I still can't find any really useful examples anywhere. Unless we count gambling and illicit money transfers. All other associated activity appears like a rounding error compared to its non-crypto counterparts to me.
But at face value, if you could add a small seamless transaction cost to the web (idk, it takes 1c to read a blog post and 50c to post a blog comment), you'd basically eliminate almost every form of spam and re-align the incentives in the attention economy away from those of online advertisement. Ultimately it could just save the web from the mess it's become.
The banking and cards system isn't set up for that sort of workflow. Transaction costs are too high and you'd basically tie all your online activity to your real identity. So you need something new.
A distributed ledger would be almost required for future-proofing. There's an enormous juicy opportunity for rent-seeking if you assign a private entity the task of being the arbiter of every transaction of the new web; that needs to be designed out.
The one application where this isn't true is when regulatory risk prevents lawful verifiers -- i.e. illegal transactions. So, it's not coincidence -- proof-of-x will always be dominated by illegal user stories and desire paths as it is now, because that's where it's not strictly inferior.
Ransomware ? /s