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Yes, I do the same. Almost all my searches are restricted to specific sites. Still, Google is the best at searching specific sites, usually much better than the site-specific search functions.

It certainly has gotten worse, ever since they started thinking it's a good idea to let AI "guess what you want." But such a widely used product doesn't die quickly...

A few reasons:

- I don't think that ETH specifically is the next big thing, just blockchain technology like ETH in general. There is lots of competition, both on top of ETH as well as different approaches.

- The price itself isn't strongly correlated with usage or value. Sure it's used for gas, but the price is mostly driven by speculation for now. So you never know what's "already priced in"

- Timing is hard. The space is still extremely nascent. There may very well be a few more crashes and cycles before it all settles down and becomes more mainstream. The timeframe here could be years. I think it's totally possible that crypto prices crash 90% tomorrow - but it's already too big to go away completely.

So I don't really have an opinion on the current ETH price, I'd just be gambling.

Bitcoin may have its place, but it's not (at least not in practice) programmable. Most of the exciting stuff these days is happening on Ethereum and other chains that try to solve Ethereum's scalability problems. So I'd start looking at that.

I don't think there was a single moment in time it clicked for me. It was a combination of using some of the DeFi services, listening to to other people in the space, and trying to build stuff. I recommend learning by doing and trying to build something on Ethereum, ideally something that connects to existing services. Just using the developer tools will give you a sense of how early the space is.

I think it clicked for me when I understood the combination of:

- All data and code is freely available to everyone. Imagine you can literally copy Google, including all their code and user data, because you believe their user experience or ad model sucks. If you make a better version of it that attracts users you will get rewarded.

- You don't need business models such as subscriptions, ads, etc, because payments are natively built into everything.

- Everything is composable. That's huge. Imagine every service and website on the internet exposes everything as a global well-defined API that you can integrate into your own applications without restrictions or permission. These lego blocks may enable completely new applications.

- You don't need to manage infrastructure for storing data, or servers.

- Value, in all kinds of forms, is freely tradeable and transferable

A lot of things we use today can be built with drastically better business models, no intermediaries that extract money from you, and correct user incentives.

Most of HN seems to hate crypto. My answer is still blockchain, but without the currency. I only recently (~1-2 years ago) got into Ethereum development and it turned my view of the digital world around. It showed me what the internet with a completely different monetization layer and without central entities like AWS or Google can look like.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and speculation is the most obvious use case right now, and I don't think that will change over the next 1-2 years. But I'm convinced that many more will follow.

I was just a little bit too young when the dot com boom happened, mostly playing games and hanging out in IRC channels during those times. I always imagine how cool it would've been if I had been a capable developer back then. The blockchain ecosystem(s) are the first technology in the last 10-20 years that feel the same - it's incredibly early with people hacking away trying to build basic things using a completely different model of the world.

I didn't "get it" for the longest time, ignoring cryptocurrencies for many years. But once I "got it" it completely changed my way of thinking. I don't know about the timeline, but I'm more convinced than ever that it's the next big thing and that the centralized internet as we know it will no longer exist in a few decades.

For the record, I hold neither BTC nor ETH (besides what I use for development) and I didn't get rich from it.