[erickj]

There is absolutely snake-oil and speculation slithering amount the beneficial projects.

Far too many people see this as a quick way to dup others and make a quick buck, because that has been profitable so far. However that in itself doesn't diminish that decentralized distributed consensus is a new class of tool that did not exist before Bitcoin. And while Bitcoin is a very inefficient implementation as we're learning, there are now new protocols with far better efficiency guarantees than proof-of-work