Fundamentally, very little has changed, and of the significant changes, most of it doesn’t matter to the average user.

We make a lot of noise about the sovereignty of personal data, and the public nature of the blockchain. Yet the median user is a very simple entity: they care that they can do a thing with a thought, and where that doesn’t exist, a click of a button.

In this regard, the people who care about privacy and the composability of the blockchain need to abstract that into a usability problem, then set out to solve it.

So far, no one has been able to do that, which causes the skeptic to announce that we have yet to find use for the blockchain. This, I think, is rather harsh. Infact, I suspect it is incorrect.

The original plan of the ground zero blockchain - bitcoin - has been largely fulfilled. A digital-native currency, overseen by consensus rules on a distributed ledger, that requires no government or bank oversight: check. As a result, anyone can speculate, collateralize and build DeFi protocols on the foundation of this idea.

e-Money has happened, is happening, and continues to happen. It’s now just a matter of creativity. When people call Crypto a financial speculative bubble, I wonder if I am missing the point, or they are: that’s exactly what it was supposed to be.

The real kicker is the idea of programmable money, which is where we’re a bit stuck - for now at least. With the creation of the Turing-Complete computer managing state in a Singleton, we can do literally anything, but we’ve so far rebuilt solid web2 concepts on shaky, expensive and downright horrible web3 infrastructure.

When people complain about dApps being unusable, and gas fees being prohibitive, when people announce that NFTs (originally designed to be ‘deeds’ - ways to prove to the EVM by way of a smart contract that X owns Y) are nothing more than money laundering instruments, they’re expressing exasperation at this much horsepower used to mow a lawn.

Because I’m adopting a techno-optimist’s stance here, I think that this is an understandable lull in the technological adoption cycle. We’ve clumsily built the infrastructure, and no one knows what to do with it, so we’re doing more of the same thing. But in all this randomness, someone will build something truly useful, and we’ll adjust the infrastructure to support that thing, which will give birth to more useful somethings which will kick off the reinforcing loop, where app upgrades the infrastructure, which makes it possible for more apps to happen.