“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law' becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s”
-Some dude who writes for The New York Times...
There were some “the Internet is a fad” takes, but it wasn’t a widely held viewpoint. No one pushed back on corporations putting up websites. “Crypto is snake oil” is pretty common right now, and a lot of people are rejecting NFTs.
Also, the NYT is often garbage.
https://fair.org/take-action/action-alerts/new-york-times-re...
They/we were saying that many of the businesses that were being heavily invested in were unsound because they lacked a real plan towards profitability. Many businesses had no chance of turning profit, but were VC funded like crazy. I worked at a company that was doing "group buy" purchases and the product themselves weren't really getting real group discounts, so they just burned investment money to discount them. Literally buying customers under the thought that getting scale would just eventually solve the problem. And then the whole house of cards fell apart.
It wasn't until a few years later, when Google figured it out with AdWords, etc. that people started making real money.
There's no inherent reason to assume that this will happen with cryptocurrency.