Okay, decentralized currency is one idea. This can be used to implement some money with a monetary policy that is transparent and modified through consensus: eg bitcoin - deflationary via finite supply. Multi-party wallet is another. With this, cryptographic signatures from a majority of the owners is required to transfer currency/digital assets. Non-fungible tokens is another. This can be used to — as an example — publish land deeds and property deeds online and make them easily transferred as opposed to the current systems which are not fool-proof and are not as user friendly (look at selling a house and how expensive it is for no good reason). Or what about decentralized finance? A user can literally borrow money against Bitcoin without the need of an authority which can discriminate against him for no good reason. How nice is it that we can now operate such systems that are robust to censorship.

But you will just dismiss all these ideas. Same way people dismissed all the ideas people were imagining when the internet is young.

If you want to broaden your mind— just detach the idea of blockchain from the price of Bitcoin. Yes, it’s insane to the point of being obscene.

What stops the authority from blocking internet access they can't spy on..

That is a very different discussion altogether.

Its a major problem to all the hype around crypto - it relies on a centralized internet infrastructure.

If needed TOR is always available. Besides, internet may be vulnerable to ISP censorship for something like DNS but I would love to hear your approach for censoring something like the BTC network.

DPI can detect TOR for example. In the end your are still running on a centrally run network.

Some examples that are being worked on right now:

Trading of any financial asset - why do we need Robinhood / Fidelity etc to trade shares? If shares in companies can be listed on a blockchain then people can trade them anywhere anytime directly with each other even when they don't trust each other.

Larger markets for digital goods: Many games have started putting their items on Etherum (or layer 2 solutions) so that players can easily trade them without the developers needing to run their own marketplace. This can then extend to being able to use items across multiple games, or trade items from one game with items from another.

Now there's ethereum tokens that allow the original creator to get a cut of all trades of that item. This opens an interesting funding model where a company could create an open source permissionless game where you download the client, connect to the public chain, play and acquire items, trade those items with others, and the game creators gain funds based on a cut of all trade happening around the game which allows them to further development. Then because it's open source people can create forks with their own art styles and mod the game easily and people can participate in the same world with many different clients.