I'm not involved in nor have I ever bought anything crypto related. But I'll say this for it, it's the most interesting new tech to hit the internet in the past couple decades.

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.

Bigger than VR/AR, IoT, AI or smartphones? Chaum was talking about digital currency around the dawn of the web so I’m not sure you could say there’s been anything much less incremental there.

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.

I suppose I should clarify what I mean. I mean crypto is maybe the most interesting new "protocol" type thing to use the internet in a new and different way.

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.

VR was pretty hyped a few years ago.

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.