I think it's easy to get lost in the weeds on this. What was the fundamental innovation of Bitcoin? It was a blockchain that functioned as a decentralized ledge

I think it's easy to get lost in the weeds on this. What was the fundamental innovation of Bitcoin? It was a blockchain that functioned as a decentralized ledger that allowed un-trusted parties to verifiably exchange value without a trusted intermediary. Game theoretical mechanics were added to try to prevent collusion, resist censorship, and to make the network permissionless, to varying degrees of success. What is the cost of this? Obviously, massive inefficiency. Bitcoin's solution to the Byzantine Generals problem (which was previously unsolved) was to propose that everyone store a copy every single transaction that ever happened and have everyone verify that, and then to protect that network, to instigate a Red Queen's race incentivized by a self-reinforcing reward mechanism. Is this an optimal solution? No. Did design decisions lead to perverse consequences that the creator(s) didn't intend? Yes. Is this also extremely limited in functionality due to it's original design constraints (which have since ossified, perhaps intractably)? Sure. And do most things require the function that a blockchain (or decentralized ledger technology in general) provides? No. But, it does solve a very real problem, and all of this "waves hands" is part of the process of discovering where it's most appropriate. I think what's being lost in this discussion, since almost no one posting here is either passingly familiar with the past decade of crypto-economic research, or with the current state of the art in "crypto" technology (almost none of which revolves around or even involves Bitcoin these days). Almost all of the promising new networks provide at least 1000X transaction throughput at 1000X+ transaction efficiency while retaining decent Nakamoto coefficients and allowing some level of computation ("smart contract") and composability. (Yes there is also plenty of useless stupid stuff that sadly is a huge waste of resources, but hey, we survived Dotcom Bubble. It's just part of the process.) I don't begrudge anyone who doesn't see the potential there, just as I don't worry about anyone who might have said that the Internet's impact would be no greater than the fax machine (in fact, a single Nobel laureate chimed in early on to both of these sentiments) - whether this turns out to be true will depend largely on the people who choose to build their vision and prove people wrong... or not. Also, there's no question it's all a damn mess, but much more broadly than crypto.