Bitcoin as "digital gold" that's easier to procure, store, move around, and split into pieces is clearly a "killer app". Gold has intrinsic value but it's market cap far exceeds that - it requires a "shared delusion" to accept that it's a store of value. I wouldn't say that Bitcoin as a store of value has society wide acceptance but 1T market cap is still very significant. I keep reading on hacker news that crypto bros lost all their money in the bubble that's now over, but the bitcoin I bought just 2 years ago is still way up. The real losers were the tech stocks I bought - maybe paying engineers 500k a year was the real bubble?
Then again, never try to convince someone of something when their salary depends on believing otherwise.
Uniswap likewise has billions in daily volume. Again, that's significant. I really don't understand how the hacker news groupthink can see a piece of technology that enables something completely brand new - decentralized market making - getting used daily to move billions of dollars around and say "there's absolutely nothing there".
Maybe you think there's no killer app because you hang out on upvote-centric site like hacker news and reddit where people downvote the hell out of things that contradict their narrative. Hacker news is a groupthink bubble.
There's many other examples. Look at how often people brought up energy usage and GPU shortages when NFTs get brought up. Then look how often it gets brought up when LLMs get brought up. It's night and day. None of these people cared about the environment. They didn't like crypto so it was a talking point against it - that's it. Because now, ETH is on proof of stake but everyone and their dog are buying 4090s so they can make waifus with Stable Diffusion. And all those "you're melting the planet people!" are conspicuously quiet.
What exactly is the killer app of LLM? A bunch of writing tools for SEO spam? Does anyone seriously read what ChatGPT writes and think this thing could do real literature or journalism? Everybody wants to use AI to write, nobody wants to read what AI writes. The only real "killer app" I'll give it is Github copilot. Most everything else is froth.
When NFTs were trendy, I read constantly on here they were beanie babies, that they were naming a star, whatever. You know what bubble I saw excited about them? Not the tech bros, but artists interested in a new way of monetizing their work. Go read Grammy award winnner RAC's twitter - he addresses people saying he "scammed" people by @ mentioning those he sold NFTs to and asking if they feel scammed. Fans of his bought the NFTs so they had a digital collectible representing his album, he got money to make art.
When Babe Ruth signs a baseball, it's still just a dingy baseball, but it has emotional significance to people. NFTs were the digital equivalent of that. I'm not surprised techies that have no art in their lives struggle to wrap their head around that.
But what is disappointing is that now Stable Diffusion takes a bunch of art that real humans tirelessly made, uses some neural net to rejigger it, and tech bros will die in the trenches making sure we legitimaze this quasi-plagriasm. For all the talks of NFTs being scams and generative AI being substance, I see one technology that incentivized real humans to make real art and another technology that does the opposite, takes money out of artists pockets so people can use algorithms to lift their style.
I'm not trying to oversimplify these topics but it gets tiresome reading the exact same tired talking points about generative AI being substantive and web3 being all scams when there's strong arguments indicating otherwise. It's just impossible to read them when on sites like these they get faded out because you're not allowed to have divergent opinions without a bunch of defensive dorks downvoting you into oblivion.
There's one last important point I want to make. Sites like Reddit and Hacker News and especially mainstream media are unduly influenced by big corporations. True blockchain use cases give power back to the individual. Sure, there's plenty of VC pump and dump shitcoins in crypto such as Solana and NEAR but the long term real utility is about the individual. Meanwhile, LLMs are almost exclusively trained and served by massive corporations, the same massive corporations that can influence the media you read. If a journalist wants to write an article about crypto energy usage, they'll write it. If they want to write about LLM energy usage, you have some of the richest, most powerful people in the world with some of the premier PR firms in the world who can influence that journalist and that publication in all sorts of ways. So critical stories about AI are more likely to get buried than critical stories about crypto. Keep that in mind.
To me, the biggest difference between the AI hype and the crypto hype is that crypto had the skeptics and the critics in the room - as it should. But AI is badly, badly lacking those skeptics and critics.