I'd argue some of the cryptocash ideas thrown around in the 90s were vastly superior on the technical front. We've had the schematics for instantanous, high transaction volume, offline, double-spend resistant, completely untraceable and anonymous, digital cash for 25 years... with no blockchain or energy crazy energy consumption requirements.

Why didn't these technologies succeed? Because none of those properties have any business advantage over boring, simple, centralized credit-card processing and back then everything was sealed up in patents until it missed the boat.