Do you understand how a spark plug works or how a hardware interrupt works within the Linux kernel?
I don’t, but people who have specialized in those specific disciplines and spent their time thinking about how these things work have lead to usable cars and usable/better operating systems as a result. USB is a spec that I don’t care how it works, just that it does.
I think crypto concepts like BFT, MEV, consensus, etc are advanced concepts for specialists in the crypto space who are building these same sorts of layers of abstraction that people will generally be using in the future. I don’t need to know how a spark plug works to drive my car, and the average person doesn’t need to understand how a physical device triggers hardware interrupts in the Linux kernel to use a keyboard.
People also don’t need to understand DNS or BGP to use the internet, because some clever folks built RFCs and open protocols that were adopted and bundled together to create web browsers, routers, and the general internet. Things were also rough around the edges in the early days there too, but have now evolved to be a critical part of today’s world. Traditional mail is still a thing but the obvious winds are blowing more and more to use e-mail for things, not because it’s a fad or has a lot of hype, but because it’s demonstrably better.
People here like to throw shade on crypto but there are already useful things (like multisig smart contracts) that are not only unique to crypto and useful today, but imply that there are other new and useful building blocks that need to be realized and developed to unlock more interesting and complex use cases (you can’t have Netflix or e-commerce without DNS and BGP for example, even if the vast majority of users have no idea how it works).
People excited about the space (disclaimer: I am excited about the space) see the possibilities based on the building blocks that exist today, not to mention the very real spike in practical cryptographic research that’s being done (zero knowledge proofs as a field of study has been massively accelerated by the cryptocurrency space). People also struggled to see secure real time video calls or online banking as a result of the DNS protocol being developed or the RSA algorithm being created, but some did see the implications and got very excited about that future.