Imho the "print-your-own-money" siren call is only one of the aspects that hampered the whole blockchain world from delivering the disruption it so much craved.

Imho the "print-your-own-money" siren call is only one of the aspects that hampered the whole blockchain world from delivering the disruption it so much craved. The core architectures themselves are somehow too overengineered for broad applicability. Maybe that is what was needed to support the digital gold use case, but it is manifestly not needed for all sorts of other very relevant decentralized applications (bittorrent, fediverse, messaging, email etc) Its a mute point whether the whole crypto/blockchain period was a net positive. It certainly made a noisy case for "re-decentralization" given the very real and mostly harmful status quo. One could also argue that it diverted vital resources to potentially dead-end or limited use areas. The recurrent scams may also give decentralization a bad name to an uninformed public that can't distinguish all the different versions. What matters next is that projects that deliver real benefits to users get attention and traction. Worth keeping in mind that the real trouble starts when you get noticed by vested interests as a potential threat.