To me cryptocurrency sounds like monorail or electric bus. Both technologies were designed to fix one aspect of existing transport systems.

Monorail concept appeared around 1900, trying to reduce the elevated railways problem. One designer thought of reducing the use of metal. Wuppertal suspension railway uses much more metal for tracks than conventional trams. There is a special monorail in Britain, built in 1940s, that stands on A-shaped legs. The only rail is supported by some metal triangles, using the same amount of metal. Later models, first built in Disneyland, use concrete (which contains a lot more iron in the concrete itself besides the reinforcement), and rubber wheels (sacrificing the advantage of low friction). Their biggest problem is switches: they're heavy and huge. Suspended monorails use big box instead of a rail, because swaying carriages are uncomfortable, and to hold them, the track must resist the force of a long lever. Errr... what was the reason to go for all that, in the first place? Make simpler track and use less rails/metal? Not achieved at all.

Electric buses... just 2 words: they're 3-5 times more expensive, and a whole route of e-buses requires just as much electric equipment as trolleybus line. Plus, e-buses spend twice more time charging than riding. Which means you need to triple the fleet of triple-quintiple more expensive vehicles. Even if battery technology progresses, as some insist, let it improve for private, not public money.

It seems that blockchain is similar: couple of advantages, lots of big disadvantages.

You can use the technology to make products that are quite unique. I used a game engine to generate art and also provide a bunch of ways to interact with the art, and tokenized the generated pieces. Owners of the pieces will be able to load their art into this game and interact with it directly. Yes, I could have done this with traditional web infra, however it would rely on me managing certs to prove ownership, and there is not an easy way to transfer ownership to other users on a secondary market. There's a lot of parts of the web3 tech that I've been interested in and think it's just a pretty unique ecosystem.

The way I look at it is that this is a tool. The way it is used is up to the creativity of the engineer(s) working with it. I think that using NFTs in this manner is a lot easier for me to manage than other approaches, and it's pretty fun. Practical use? Idk it's a fun art project that I hope people enjoy, but yeah I do think it was easier for me to implement in this method than a traditional web app.

But I do think there are plenty of practical use cases that you could leverage this technology for in terms of access based on ownership of the digital assets.

I always thought we only owned things because a central authority says we do.

That is, until you close on a house and spend hundreds to potentially tens of thousands of dollars on title searches and bank fees.

Then ETH at the worst gas fees looks generous

True, but the title searches and bank fees are just regulatory cruft slathered on from the real estate business.

The cryptocurrency guys who think cryptocurrencies will be immune to this are probably gonna be shocked and annoyed.

You have described what a home computer was in the 80s. It found many problems.

Did it? Today's computers are mostly descendents of more heavyweight '80s computers. I know there are like a few C64s running webservers and stuff for kicks.

Home computers were good for games or learning to program, not sure they were actually that useful outside of those things.

Edit: Ok Atari STs were good for music and Amigas were apparently good for graphics rendering.