This explainer article on NYT, The Latecomer's Guide to Crypto by Kevin Roose, while good at explaining the ideas behind cryptocurrencies, blockchains, and NFT's, didn't convince me that this is something I should pay any more attention to. Even if isn't all a scam, or some tech cult, I'm just not a finance person. I have never bought a stock and I probably google inflation every other week. From a programming perspective, I'm curios as to how this is built, and why so many young folks are so enthusiastic about web3. But overall, I don't understand where this web utopianism is coming from when this is something that's mostly about money.
John Oliver explained it best by saying that cryptocurrency is "everything you don't understand about money combined with everything you don't understand about computers."