[simonw]

"but these same debates happened ith other techs before which are now mainstream in a similar fashion as this here"

They really didn't. In my 20+ year tech career I have never seen any new technology prove anywhere near as divisive as web3/crypto.

[almost]

Before we mostly had to deal with people emotionally invested in a new thing, now they’re all financially invested as well. It makes for a different conversation.

[acdha]

Yes: the financial aspect definitely seems to have changed this — I share Simon's impression, and what this reminds me most of wasn't tech but the adjacent stock market circa late 1999/2000. If you knew a day trader at the time, they would be hyping up random stocks talking about how it was a sure thing to be the next Pets.com but if you asked them any questions at all it immediately became apparent that they had no idea about how that company worked, what the competitive environment was like, or how they could possibly become profitable. Some of them made fairly large amounts of money talking things up and selling before the inevitable drop but quite a few others were left holding the bag.

That level of confident ignorance is the prevailing tone of the cryptocurrency world: everyone talks about changing the world but it's extremely hard to find someone who actually understands the details of the business they're trying to get into or why it works the way it currently does, but they don't let that stop them because they've already bought in they stand to lose potentially quite large sums of money if they can't find buyers.