Pay off your mortgage in two years by speculating on bitcoin. It makes most adults go "Wow! Yeah that is cool!"
And the currency side, where some advocates like to tout potential societal changes, can't gain critical mass right now with artificial scarcity tied to arbitrary hash difficulty slowing things down.
Right now it feels like the whole thing is a giant flywheel where excitement drives it faster and faster, but there's no escapement to chanel that anywhere. Maybe the better comparison to the dotcom bubble would be if all that overhype had come 30 years earlier when what ultimately became the net was just an oozing nebula developing protocols and eager enthusiasts.
That is a brand-new invention. It enables you to achieve distributed consensus in all kinds of problems.
The problem space is vast, and any new solution is worth not underestimating. It's hard to predict the future: http://tlb.org/#predictions
July, 2002: CDs and DVDs compatible with today's will remain the most common way to buy or rent music or video through 2020.
They aren't nearly as tangible. The big innovation here is the blockchain tech itself -- a distributed, immutable, public ledger. It's a very specific innovation, and it mostly benefits big businesses, but it's an innovation nonetheless.
But of course the social innovation might have been to make that long established technology cool and popular.
What are the equivalents with cryptocurrencies/blockchains? I ask this all the time, no one seems to have an answer.
The extent of the discussion around cryptocurrencies seems to be rambling on about things that either, no one understands, few people care about, or as a solution to a "problem" that few people if any, actually have. But people are "really excited" about these obscure curiosities, because if they can get other people about excited too they can sell their holdings for more than they paid for them.
The comparison between the web and cryptocoins seems really strained because not only can you not show the average Joe anything that would really impress him done with a cryptocurrency, beyond an irrational exuberance, but also because the two are so vastly different in scope.
The impetus of bitcoin was about an experiment of enacting a certain type of monetary system related to a certain political philosophy. In comparison the web is basically infinite. You can read about, write about, or discuss that political philosophy, or any of a hundred others, or you can do any of millions of other things having nothing to do with a political philosophy.
One of the great legacies of the web is the dematerialization and demonetization it wrought due to zeroing out reproduction and distribution costs.
Now we have people pretending that code that can be literally copy and pasted to start a new network of ____coin is somehow super wow! valuable!