That's a pretty high bar

Benz made the first car in 1886, which in your analogy means today is 1900.

I will be curious to see how crypto holds up in recession or under monetary crisis.

One of the reasons it was created hasn't really been tested, since the economy in the west hasn't faced a major crisis since its invention.

It seems plausible (if unlikely) that external events could push crypto adoption into more "normal" use cases. E.g. Israel's recent ban on cash transactions points to one way more things may become untenable in traditional finance.

I don't actually have strong opinions on what will happen - I do find your analogy fun to think about though!

For the record, I don't think crypto is useless, I just don't think it's hitting that bar for a transformative technology. It's proponents certainly do describe it as potentially transformative or revolutionary.

Yes, I'm aware the dates of invention don't quite align, and the time window is cherry-picked for dramatic effect. But it's food for thought.

Nobody was debating the utility of cars and phones 14 years later. With crypto, it's like we're still looking for something as fundamental as an essential use case.

Yeah.. the hype I think makes it harder to appreciate the main use case, which essentially was already covered by the first cryptocoin, and is still where it sees the most real-world use: resistance to state control. Folks use it to evade capital controls, use darkweb markets, launder money, find radical activism, etc.

That's still a big deal, but it's far short of the impact-for-everyone promised by some folks in the industry.

It is a very high bar. But I believe that the bar matches the claims made about the technology. Few advocates seem to be talking about cryptocurrencies as a useful tool for incremental progress (granted, this could be my bubble talking). Advocates seem to be saying that it will remake the world in extremely fundamental ways.

This conversation is silly. You are snapshotting the transformative window. If you snapshotted the internet in the 70s or 80s you'd get a much more mundane picture.

I don't know if I think cryptocurrency will be as transformative as the internet or the mobile phone, but I think it will be within a level or two of that scale. It makes good on its promise year after year. NFTs just became popular in the last few years, and that is only one example of many. Are you going to bet against NFTs in the long run? I certainly wouldn't. We don't even know all the technologies crypto is going to enable yet.

For the majority of people on earth, it has not changed their lives in any meaningful way. Their lives may in fact be indistinguishable from an alternate reality where crypto was never invented.