There are two good reasons for that:
1) The culture around careful discussion of crypto currencies does well to keep seperated financial advice and claims about economics, incentives and technology (or in the crypto space you call of these 'the protocol' or something else to refer to the complete package a distributed ledger technology aims to achieve) - these claims can quickly get mixed up with lies to make money using buzzwords. You don't want this discussion to turn into people shilling what they personally own, trust me, and refraining from naming good projects when off the metaphorical sale's floor is simply good manners.
2) Crypto is still very nascent. Smart contract platforms that are fast and cheap are only starting to be rolled out and stress tested - without that most of the auxiliary functions people envision are only aspirations. If that's where basic smart contracts are right now, then more advanced protocols you can easily tell are much less far along. Because of the lack of industry proven protocols to do what believers pretty much know will happen someday, recommending any means imparting risk on people like you who expect others to tell you "what's up." Its not that fun giving someone risky investment advice when they refuse to look into it themselves and shoulder that risk.
I don't know about politics, but there are definitely coins reshaping the economy. Hell, bitcoin by itself is reshaping the economy, being considered by many major institutions to officially be a new asset class now[1]. It doesn't mean a total replacement of the economy, if that's what you're thinking, but it's definitely reshaping it.
DeFi is already taking a nice chunk out of central banks' lunch. Celsius, USDC, BlockFi, etc, are able to credibly offer 6% or higher yield[2], whereas banks can only offer, at best 0.6%, nowhere close to beating inflation.
That's just two use cases, and if I had more time this morning I could go into more (didn't even touch on smart contracts at all). Wouldn't be surprised if you'll dismiss them out of hand as bad projects according to whatever internal criteria you have, and if so, I don't think you'll ever be able to convinced that anything a good project.
It just gets annoying to hear people dismiss the entire space all the time without spending more than a few minutes looking into it, and/or assuming that the space never evolved from 4-5 years ago, where you could safely make those claims.
[1]: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-is-officially-a-ne...
There's such an abundance of VC money that funding isn't scarce. Developer talent is however.
Seeing as this "planetary infrastructure" will consume more energy than it produces. A better description would be "planetary snakeoil". The economic equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
I really don't see how this thing shakes out well for humanity (not even including carbon costs)
Is it a problem, though? Not according to the protocol.
Asserting that it is a problem is a political statement.
I know very little about this space, but I get a very strong "real deal" feel from Charles Hoskinson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hoskinson
https://twitter.com/IOHK_Charles
https://roadmap.cardano.org/en/
I am most optimistic about blockchain based innovation with respect to direct/liquid/etc democracy.
Please stop pushing this snakeoil!
I hear this all of the time, but the people and projects “reshaping the economy and politics” are rarely ever named. When it comes to blockchain and cryptocurrency, we’re supposed to believe the “good ones” are out there, somewhere, while ignoring the fact that the blockchain/crypto space is absolutely drowning in meme tokens and obvious cash grabs.
The superiority of blockchain solutions seems to be assumed for many believers, so it’s natural to assume that superior solutions will eventually arise from this superior blockchain technology.
But the superiority of blockchain isn’t obvious for most problems. Moreover, if someone does build a superior solution on top of a blockchain, what’s stopping a centralized player from duplicating the benefits of that superior solution at a lower cost in a centralized platform?
This is the conundrum of blockchain and token projects: For them to be superior to the consumer they must eventually have lower fees and costs. Yet blockchain is inherently more expensive than equivalent centralized solutions and, even worse, the token investors expect astronomical (to the moon) returns on their investments, which necessitates extracting a lot of money from the users after the speculative frenzy has died off. At least currently, most blockchain/crypto/token schemes are built with the assumption that the consumer is the person they will sell the tokens to as a speculative investment, not the person who will actually use the service itself.
Decentralized solutions actually have a lot of problems that proponents avoid talking about. For example, DAOs are promoted as ways of decentralizing ownership, but we're supposed to ignore the fact that a well-capitalized player could simply spend their way into controlling a DAO by purchasing up enough tokens. And unlike with real-world companies, the ownership can be purchased anonymously in a way that makes it appear to come from a lot of organic traction. A well-funded company could simply spend their way into controlling a DAO and neither regulators, users, nor consumers would even know. We're supposed to believe this model is a boon for decentralization, but it's a dream come true for surreptitious takeovers.