I feel exactly the same. I have friends that have been trying to explain to me what the huge advantages of crypto and NFTs are for almost a decade and it's still very hazy to me. Nobody explained ChatGPT to me. I saw prompt and started typing some questions about a python library and it was immediately obvious to me that this would be super useful to me.
Sometimes I think you need to use a new tech for a while before the benefits become obvious. I worked for Apple retail back when the iPhone was first released. I remember even after getting our hands on it release day that it was neat and exciting, but also something I'd completely written off at $800 because I just didn't see enough use for what it offered compared to a dumb phone and an iPod.
Part of the sales experience at the time was they gave all of us one to carry around during our shift on the sales floor and encouraged us to show it off and use it to look up things we'd normally have gone to one of the demo computers to look up. About 2 months later, I'm taking a road trip with a destination plugged into my Garmin GPS (remember those?). I'm in the final stretches of getting where I need to go when the GPS says "you've arrived" while I'm driving down a road with nothing on either side of me. I go for another half mile or so just assuming it was off by a few hundred feet and I'd find an entrance but no such luck. Turn around, punch in the destination to the GPS again and try from the other direction, same deal. "You've arrived" in the middle of nowhere. Tried a couple more times and then pulled off to the side of the road and reached for the iPhone in my pocket to pull up some information / a map quest search, and then remembered that I don't have an iPhone in my pocket because I don't own an iPhone and just carry one on shift at work. That experience convinced me that there was value in this whole "smart phone" thing and that I would eventually be getting one.
Which isn't to say that crypto or NFTs are like iPhones, but more that I think you can't necessarily understand how useful a given piece of tech is just by someone else explaining it to you. Some things you just have to use.
I am not convinced. The first time I used an iphone I was blown away by it. Definitely a hefty price tag, but the whole user interface with swiping, pinching etc. was really eye opening. Android of course quickly caught up, but it was a completely new experience compared to existing smart phones at the time.
Same thing the first time I used google (my age is showing a bit). It was leaps and bounds better than the alternatives at the time.
With crypto it always feels to me like I am dealing with scams, ponzies or something useless. Solving problems that weren't really problems or creating problems that didn't exist beforehand. I have rarely been so underwhelmed by any technical innovation.
the iPhone 1 survived thanks to Apple's enormous marketing budget, and a 33% price cut from $600 to $400.
Apple has goodwill from its iPod success and iTunes store. FB has nothing. Horizon Worlds is completely different from Facebook/Insta, whereas the iPhone had a new UI but with many familiar elements.
I know Jobs tried to talk up webapps as being the future at the time, but apps were very clearly coming - it was touted as a computer for your pocket, there's no way they weren't going to let people write software for it. And if they didn't, then someone else would make one that could, and completely eat their lunch.
I think different technologies are going to appeal to different audiences and users. I've been pretty blown away by generative AI, both stuff like Stable Diffusion and now, these ultra-powerful LLMs (although I didn't much about it before that) - it's obvious that pairing w/ ChatGPT makes me a better programmer, and it functions as a pretty good research assistant as to boot, however, talking/showing it around to a lot of friends, many of them are dismissive or pretty meh around then and so far, and profess to not have any use for it.
But then again, that may be why there's huge adoption of crypto in countries like Nigeria (32%!) or Vietnam (21%) [1] (obviously, crypto is a lot more useful in your life if you have a weaker central currency or less financial access; their deeper dive into Sub-Saharan Africa adoption of crypto in particular is fascinating [2]).
Likewise, I'm a believer in the eventual adoption of XR, but a big part of my excitement is really my desire for infinite screen space. Still, I can see the argument that everything will be spatial in the future and personally, I see these trends tying together a lot more than not. Maybe they're on different hype curves, but decentralized financial transactions on credibly neutral, near real time networks (w/ smart contracts) seem like a natural fit for agentic AI. And in the VR arena, I'm seeing some incredibly compelling stuff happening with NeRFs and other generative media that is going to make virtual/augmented immersion a lot more compelling (one of the big bottlenecks for VR right now is generating compelling evergreen content and experiences).
