It is so weird how the huge amount of money behind crypto is sucking smart people in and then cognitive dissonance takes over and they start believing nonsense must be real because otherwise what they're working on is nonsense.

It's so deeply upsetting: I keep seeing people I have respected tumbling down the crypto NFT hole

But, blockchain (and I just can't help think NFT too) has seriously valuable use cases.

Speculation aside, those use-cases have steadfastly refused to reveal themselves to me for over a decade now - and I've been paying some level of attention to them Immutable ledgers and merkel trees sure, but distributed consensus looks to be inefficient, over-hyped rubbish

To be more accurate: distributed consensus is genuinely brilliant computer science, but it has terrible negative externalities and the things it lets you build (censorship-proof currencies) have negatives that far outweigh the positives, unless you are a radical libertarian