Because at a fundamental level, distributed adversarial consensus
commoditizes trust. Institutional trust is an enormous bottleneck in our economy. It is a virtuous cycle that ossifies industries, e.g. banking, and consumer finance. Why does it
still take longer to send money to someone in another country than it does to mail them a package? Why are credit cards a pull architecture, even though that is pretty obviously incorrect?
The reason is that the institutions that created these things are extremely well insulated from competition. They are well insulated from competition, in part, because they have acquired the public's trust, through a long track record of not stealing everyone's money.
Solutions to the distributed adversarial consensus problem provide a way to give new businesses access to the same, or even greater, levels of public trust. Now - obviously there are still scams in this space. When I say 'trust', what I mean is, in the sense that two counterparties can transact in a way that doesn't require intermediation to ensure the completion of the transaction.
This really is a fundamentally novel and socially significant innovation. It really does reshape the competitive landscape of a number of industries. At least, it has the potential to. But it is also true that there is an enormous amount of greed and hype floating around. And this isn't in any way intended to justify the ICO scams, or the sky high prices of the existing currencies. It's not clear that anyone has yet figured out the right interface and set of practices for actually realizing all these economic gains. Nobody has yet made the iPhone of blockchain.
But the basic technical problem - distributed adversarial consensus was indeed solved by Satoshi. And that really does have substantial, positive social implications for the future. And I fear that people here are losing sight of that because of the gyrations of these silly markets.