Especially the part where we're always on the cusp of the entire world changing while the biggest change is just that huge sums of money changed hands, inducing psychosis in a large group of investors.
Funniest part of all of it is it’s all the same actors. Same hardware even. Just the crypto shills now talk about agentic capabilities & we’re approaching a singularity man! Can’t you see!!?
There was a lot of genuinely useful tech that blockchain could have facilitated and all we were left with in the end was a mountain of scams and bitcoin.
I'm seeing something similar with AI where the genuinely useful stuff is getting washed out by the hype simply because it's a gradual improvement and not "disruptive". Meanwhile the stuff sold as disruptive like vibe coding is mostly bullshit.
i remember my friends excitedly telling me how cross border container trade is still done with paperwork because nobody trusts each others' IT systems. I'm pretty sure it still is because they can't be convinced to trust blockchain systems either.
trustworthy voting is another application. ive yet to see a political party that runs an internal voting system that doesnt rely upon you trusting a central server run by a few people. this is crazy.
It seems to me that people don't want to run their own security upon which they have no recourse if they fail, and don't think that benefits of centralized systems are worth giving up for the dubious benefits of a decentralized trust. Imagine if the scams for the currencies occurred with voting systems, with no way to undo it.
The technologies just didn't do anything that more than a small number of people wanted.
World-changing doesn't happen overnight. The internet didn't, either.
This is like 1991 internet.