> Because technical minutiae are completely irrelevant if they don't eventually convert into useful features for products with at least some level of mass-market appeal.
Why?
You might care about building businesses, mass-market appeal, blah blah, but many (most?) technologies were created because people thought they were cool or interesting or just because they could. Nobody knew what LASERs were for when they invented them.
To me the point of tech is to invent stuff and see what people do with it, not to make money or feed the economy or whatever, that’s a byproduct. Which coin is worth more money or what will gain mass market adoption is the least exciting part of the whole thing to me. We started with bitcoin having BFT consensus and proof of work to create decentralised, permissionless value (volatile or not!) but we now have multiple chains that can execute arbitrary code, sharding, performance improvements, lightweight chains, various types of proof of stake, token standards, automated market makers, DeFI, NFTs, DAOs, data availability proofs, IPFS, etc. etc.… that’s incredibly exciting! And if you read the actual academic and published research and see the advances being made, it’s even more incredible and wide ranging, and progress is very rapid.
Of course it’d be nice if _some_ of it changed the world (and maybe it already has), but there’s plenty of time for that and it may only be 1% of the interesting new tech that turns out to do so. So what? It’s incredibly cool just to learn and understand it all and think about what might be. (And sure, buy tokens or whatever if you like them or just fancy a gamble. Do your research and don’t spend what you can’t afford to lose.)