> But are we at least done pretending that crypto currency (at least, as it exists now) will ever have any practical purpose beyond being a fungible entity upon which gamblers speculate?

No, I don't think that's happened yet. I still know tons of people excited to build for "web3".

I don't think we need "rich" websites with javascript, "smart" phones in everyone's pocket, or "social media" at all.

But those all happened, and it seems to be a lot of the same vibe for "web3" builders right now.

It's difficult to get a clear picture of what exactly people think "web3" is. My general experience is that people who are caught up in web3 hype seem to actually just want simpler self-hosted/distributed resource redundancy.