For a long time, I thought of the blockchain as almost synonymous with cryptocurrencies, so as I saw stuff like “Odyssey” and “lbry” appearing and being “based on the blockchain”, my first thought was that it was another crypto scam. Then, I just got reminded of it and started looking more into it, and it just seemed like regular torrenting. For example, what’s the big innovation separating Odyssey from Peertube, which is also decentralized and also uses P2P? And what part of it does the blockchain really play, that couldn’t be done with regular P2P? More generally, and looking at the futur, does the blockchain offer new possibilities that the fediverse or pre-existing protocols don’t have?
If you take a longer historical view, there have long been strong opinions about how we should base our currency. Because money impacts us all so viscerally, even the most uninformed develop deep seated emotional stances about very obscure topics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
This link is an example of a historical moment where a stance taken against the gold standard was influential in national elections in the US.
The people who would have been emotionally exercised about bimetalism are probably the same people who we call crypto-bros today.
In all, the furor over blockchain, especially currency and NFT, has yielded heat but no light. Where’s the killer application? It never takes this long for a truly useful technology to find that killer app, not in today’s technology environment. Maybe it just isn’t that useful and people should calm down?