Uh, 2001 happens to be the year that Amazon became the biggest bookseller in the world, having been founded five years earlier. That's literally about as mainstream as you can get, and it was half a decade.
Whether or not you agree with the arc of the linked article, the basic facts are correct: blockchains have been with us for a decade now and haven't done much or made anything that wasn't itself a speculation about blockchain.
You call it speculation and that’s convenient for your argument. Bitcoin as a store of value is not speculative. It has objective qualities that make it valuable and you dismissing those as speculation lets you be ignorant to the comparable short term success of Bitcoin.
FWIW: a thing that has value only on a balance sheet is pretty much the definition of "speculation". I was saying that crypto and web3 hadn't produced any new kinds of economic activity beyond buying more crypto. The only reason to get involved in crypto now is to own crypto, just like it was a decade ago.
