In general, when ever crypto topics come up, the pro-crypto side tends to do a pretty terrible job of establishing that there are "some pretty incredible innovations occurring in crypto, gaming, and defi."
Perhaps you could list some and change our minds?
I just saw on Twitter how some one is minting NFTs using the art of a deceased artist and their family is scrambling to figure out how to stop it. There are a lot of shitty things happening in this space.
Everything else has been pretty incremental over that time period, crypto is something really new and I suspect that's why its adherents are so obsessed by it.
The thing to remember is that by now we’ve had over a decade of people making very big, obviously unfounded claims and failing to deliver much of anything. The people in that space trying to recoup their investment even felt the need to rebrand as “web3” to shake the resulting negative reputation. The obsession makes a lot of sense simply as recognition that, having failed to develop public demand, the only way for anyone involved to maintain their current valuation is by selling the possibility of future usefulness to new buyers.
We used to have lots of protocols that did different things but nowadays a lot of it has mostly been subsumed into http and we've been making and serving incrementally better (or worse depending on your perspective) websites for a couple decades plus now. If you talk to someone about the internet now, the default assumption is WWW, it's that dominant.
The last technology I think I would say was really different, interesting and widely used over the net is probably bittorrent? But even there http sites have gradually chipped away at a lot of the use cases it had.
Crypto is the first really new, interesting and actually popular "protocol" type thing to hit the internet since maybe bittorrent?
Personally I wouldn't put a penny into it because I really don't understand it, BUT if you told me in another 10 years crypto had significantly changed the world I wouldn't be surprised either, internet protocols have the power to do that, HTTP did.
Edit: Also, what exciting things are you seeing? Almost everything I see is either proposing smart contracts for intractable problems, proposing defi for intractable problems or is a straight up scam.
The HN community is very dismissive, embraces feverishly, doesn't care about, [the rest of the stances] "crypto". There are many diverse opinions in the minds of the commenters here and this type of comment, while I've seen it's like more commonly in recent times, is clearly an erroneous over generalization.
This is pretty bad when it comes to crypto topics. A lot of the crypto ecosystem is toxic and gross. Schemes, scams, marketing fluff, and meme bro attitudes galore. BUT, if you can bear to pay attention and cut through the noise, there are some pretty incredible innovations occurring in crypto, gaming, and defi. HN is very dismissive on these topics. It feels to me this community dates itself when crypto topics come up, reminding me more of my grandma at thanksgiving than young innovative technophiles.