You can not like crypto and still acknowledge the very real technology powering crypto.
Whether it's Byzantine fault tolerance, or cryptoeconomics, there are some good solutions there. People's issues tend to be whether the solutions are applicable to the world, and/or useful.
It is great, super interesting, very clever technology. Which is exactly why it is nerd-sniping: the CS of it is so interesting, it must be innovative and useful! Alas, nope not really. I was so excited about Bitcoin back when the whitepaper first came out - a totally new idea! based on ideas from cryptography! amazing! this will replace all digital payments and reshape the world! Alas, nope. Then Ethereum came along - smart contracts! so cool! just imagine the new legal infrastructure this will unlock! Alas, nope again.
I still hold out a hope (perhaps a fantasy) that all the talent and money funneling into all this, combined with the fundamentally interest and novel technology behind it, will come up with something truly innovative. It just seems like it must, right? But every new thing (most recently this NFT stuff) that comes out just further and further confirms my long-held tentative conclusion that there really isn't much there, there.
It looks to me like uniswap epitomizes the real world ownership problem discussed in the article we're discussing. "An experiment in tokenized socks" is (unironically?) highlighted on their home page.
Aave seems like something that is useful within the bubble of cryptocurrency traders, but not outside it. It strikes me as a meta thing, not a thing. It doesn't work if cryptocurrencies are never useful for anything outside that bubble.
Does Dai have a strategy for being actually useful as a currency to purchase things? Bitcoin has been trying to be useful as that for a decade with very little success.
Yearn seems to be in the same boat as Aave, it only exists in this bubble of cryptocurrency speculation.
None of this stuff or anything adjacent to it exists for anyone I interact with in my life outside of this website. What will blockchain technology be known for amongst people who are neither computer science nerds nor financial speculators? If it's just a new kind of speculative asset, like a new kind of derivative, then fine, that's innovative in a way, but it is extremely niche.
Whether it's Byzantine fault tolerance, or cryptoeconomics, there are some good solutions there. People's issues tend to be whether the solutions are applicable to the world, and/or useful.