I largely agree. I think the field is exciting and interesting, and like many crypto fanatics say, there might be parallels with the early days of the internet.
I think part of the reason it takes time for people to see the potential is that a lot of it just isn't ready for mainstream yet. The tooling is not uniform and easy, PoW really does not seem like the way to go, and scalability is largely missing. It seems many of these issues are getting solved now though!
There are other issues that still stop me from investing in this (though I would invest more time if I had). One is that I don't have a model for where this is going - I'm not sure that the most popular systems make most sense from a technical point of view. Bitcoin seems to lose out to Nano, for example, and I'm not sure why Ethereum would be better than Cardano. It could be that these technologies are just paving the way for something much cleaner down the road.
Another thing is that consistently the economics don't make sense to me, and I feel like a lot of the conversation about cryptocurrencies is sort of pseudo-economics. It doesn't make sense to me how highly Ether is valued (IMO its value should be the value of a transaction). And the idea of limited supply doesn't make sense to me in the form it is in now - I think a currency should roughly scale with the productive output that it represents, with at most mild inflation or deflation. Limited supplies of current coins only seem to serve early adopters.
I can totally imagine the existing banking system (which, I think, has a much better understanding of economics than the crypto community) adopting a lot of the tech that was developed here and fiat currencies ending up reformed rather than the world switching to community-run cryptocurrencies to a significant extent. (I would feel much more comfortable moving my money to a central bank blockchain than to Bitcoin or Ethereum.)
The existing banking system? Goliath was better than David at fighting and he was not keen to learn rock-slinging. (I'm not implying David will always win though. It's unlikely.)
Plenty of central banks seem interested in launching digital currencies. For me the main selling points of cryptocurrencies are programmability, easy international transactions, and potentially easy micro-transactions. Personally I don't care much about the fact that they are decentralized, and while I'm happy for my bank to see my transaction history I'm not that keen on having it public.
If I could move my savings into a digital currency provided by a central bank I'd do it today. Bonus points if it can be stored in something like special drawing rights rather than euros.
I think part of the reason it takes time for people to see the potential is that a lot of it just isn't ready for mainstream yet. The tooling is not uniform and easy, PoW really does not seem like the way to go, and scalability is largely missing. It seems many of these issues are getting solved now though!
There are other issues that still stop me from investing in this (though I would invest more time if I had). One is that I don't have a model for where this is going - I'm not sure that the most popular systems make most sense from a technical point of view. Bitcoin seems to lose out to Nano, for example, and I'm not sure why Ethereum would be better than Cardano. It could be that these technologies are just paving the way for something much cleaner down the road.
Another thing is that consistently the economics don't make sense to me, and I feel like a lot of the conversation about cryptocurrencies is sort of pseudo-economics. It doesn't make sense to me how highly Ether is valued (IMO its value should be the value of a transaction). And the idea of limited supply doesn't make sense to me in the form it is in now - I think a currency should roughly scale with the productive output that it represents, with at most mild inflation or deflation. Limited supplies of current coins only seem to serve early adopters.
I can totally imagine the existing banking system (which, I think, has a much better understanding of economics than the crypto community) adopting a lot of the tech that was developed here and fiat currencies ending up reformed rather than the world switching to community-run cryptocurrencies to a significant extent. (I would feel much more comfortable moving my money to a central bank blockchain than to Bitcoin or Ethereum.)