DAOs, NFTs, smart contracts, random tokens all seem less like good features and more like transparent scams or terrible ideas that don't work. It's fine if adoption is slow - but there should actually be something beyond Ponzi schemers and hackers stealing from each other. Drugs and tax evasion, sure, but how far does that take you?
What people are selling as far as DAOs, NFTs, and "smart contracts" where they mean are better and more sophisticated than Bitcoin, can all be favorably described as the application of Bitcoin's critique of money to the issuance and governance of other tokens representing other forms of property, and are inherently more complex. Least favorably described, they are scams to boost leverage powered attacks. The middle of the road might be that they're the naive notion that building more complex constructs on top of what Bitcoin defined is immediately achievable without compromising invariants that matter for useful money.
All to say that the "killer app" critique of Bitcoin probably ins't the best lens, and that if it's more complicated than custody and payments, especially for people where that isn't readily available, it's probably further out than is survivable for a single company requiring the kind of trajectory of those that create "apps".
Bitcoin is basically a kind of musical chairs for money. People buy in and try to get out and maybe they make money and maybe they lose money. People will play this game, clearly, but that doesn't mean Bitcoin is the future of money anymore than casino chips are the future of money.
Medium of exchange or rather the division of labor. Bitcoin doesn't do it. In fact, most people who like Bitcoin want it to be a terrible medium of exchange. Everytime you hear people talk about Bitcoin on Reddit there are HODL memes, aka people openly proclaim that they don't want to use the money for anything other than speculating that it goes up in value.
They're not speculating that it will go up for no reason. The investment thesis is that it solves real world problems, and that everyone who thinks it doesn't sounds like someone comparing fax machines to the internet in the 90s.
Why (and when) will average users suddenly care "because blockchain"? They don't and won't (the usage numbers reflect this). They just want to get an answer to a question in seconds, Tweet their musings, endlessly scroll pictures on Facebook/Instagram/etc, or watch Youtube videos of cats, glitter bombs, or whatever. For free. As ridiculous as it is to me and most of HN the average person is even willing to have their TV and streaming services show them endless ads. They just like that they bought that 60" TV for $400 on Black Friday.
Even the censorship/de-platforming argument falls flat. It's been demonstrated that people (as a whole), going back to our tribal roots, prefer to engage with like-minded others. It is fundamental human nature and there have been multiple studies conducted that show it's wired in to our reward circuitry.
Trump gets booted off Twitter? Enter Truth, Parler, whatever where many millions of users moved in near record time. When it comes down to it people like echo chambers and they like free. Platform for free speech? Create a Truth account and start wandering in to flame wars that go against the political leanings there. You will get booted just as Trump got booted from Twitter.
This is where I think blockchain and lack of censorship is also fundamentally flawed. They don't want to pay XYZ in some random coin to make a social media post. They also don't want to bump in to child pornography or some other universally objectionable content (in the case of true to the mantra decentralized blockchain platforms without any form of "censorship").
The same argument goes for money. Almost no one cares - they want to swipe their credit card a few times a day and move on with their lives. They do not care about transaction fees, final settlement times, etc. It's invisible. Other than credit cards and cash the average person interacts with more complicated levels of the financial and banking systems a few times in their lives. They do not care if a lifetime of home ownership (as one example) cost them $50 in wire fees. They likely have no idea (and again don't care) how the 401(k) their employer set them up with actually works.
They also don't want to discover that their wallet has been hacked, their exchange collapsed, the value of their money dropped 20% overnight, or any of the other number of ways funds go "poof" with blockchain.
Let's be clear: when Google exploded, that was the growth of the Internet in the driver's seat, not demand for Google specifically. Google's growth was a side effect of the exponential growth of the internet because it solved a need where there was no adequate incumbent solution, and where demand for that solution was growing exponentially for reasons basically unrelated to the quality of the solution.
This isn't the case for crypto, because there's an incumbent solution that works fine. More specifically, in our analogy, money is the counterpart of the Internet. Crypto is in the position of needing to slowly sap market share from an incumbent (government fiat) in the same way that, for example, DuckDuckGo does even if you feel it's a superior product.
If Bitcoin was the first-ever instance of money, I assure you its growth profile would look like Google's did.