Gambling has also proven its staying power. A low trust society and some early coin explosions will do that. I don't think its staying power is here in a healthy way, personally.
Thats not a reason for crypto being useless, anything can bribe corrupt governments to pour tax money into it.
Crypto has shown people are willing to use it as a currency for investment and day to day transactions. Its held value for a significant amount of time. The tech is evolving still and people see a lot of value in having a currency that operates outside of Governments in a decentralized way even if some people will misuse that freedom.
Crypto is going to be a new settlement layer thats it. You'll use stripe and they will settle it on their public chain. You are free to use the chain directly but no real consumer is going to do that.
Hacker News was borderline insufferable during the 2022/23 NFT craze when all the startups, investments, and headlines were going into whatever new disruption NFTs/blockchain were allegedly going to cause.
At least with AI I do get some value out of asking Gemini questions. But I hardly need or want my web browser to be a chatbot interface.
Comparing LLMs to NFT isn't fair. Being able to talk to you computer and have it understand you and even do the things you ask is literally StarTrek technology.
I've never seen a technology so advanced be so dismissed before.
The confidence with which people say these things...
s/AI/NFT and I've heard this exact sentence many times before.