I really, really don't understand where cryptocurrencies are going. Billions have been poured in this technology for almost no actual return technologically wise.
And I understand, because interest are not aligned. It really seems like nobody actually care about advancing the state of art, except actual researcher who work in universities and not in crypto startups...
Cryptocurrencies had a goal and a usefulness when they were at least used to buy drugs online and send a few bucks to your friends. Now you cannot even use them for that. Everybody saw the rise of the bitcoin valuation and since then, all that matter is how much you can make by trading crypto. The actual usefulness of the crypto, what it can do, is utterly irrelevant. This is proven by btc being one of the most traded and valuable crypto even though it is one of the crypto with the less feature. Most btc trade are not even going through the bitcoin network but through third party, so btc even fail at its own goal.
And because crypto are seen as an investment, everybody is holding, and nobody is using it, and you would be a fool to do so, since tomorrow, your 1 shitcoin might be worth 3 times what you brought it for. And no, "stable coin" is not an answer since the only thing they have been used for is to trade between crypto...
Then, to make matter even worse, the crypto community is its own worst enemy. Since it has been proven that, to make a few buck, all it takes is "creating" your own crypto and mining the first few block before other get in on it, you get thousand of startup coming out of nowhere proposing new crypto that are literally clone of other crypto. Tell me, what is the difference between Polkadot and Kusama ? Or is there even a significant technological difference between Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Dogecoin, etc ?
We are more than 5 years into this crypto mania with an ungodly amount of money being thrown at it and there has been no significant technological progress, no crypto that is useful enough to be used by anybody else but crypto-fanatic trying to pump and dump it, and this is now becoming one of the worse climate disaster in a while. And all the while, every people invested in crypto will just talk about price, valuation, investment, hodling, etc. It is clear what is their real purpose.
If you want to see actual progress in distributed computing, look for scientific paper coming from universities.