>Cryptocurrencies have existed for eleven years, they should have something to show for right now.

IMO this argument is pretty seriously flawed. We tend to think of revolutionary technologies as "overnight successes" but that's rarely the case.

If we had abandoned the smartphone 11 years after the first attempt at, we would never have the iPhone. If we had abandoned combustion engines 11 years after their first attempt, we never would have had the automobile. New technology is hard and requires a lot of tinkering.

I also think the author fails to capture what people look to as the potential of crypto. While there is a definite subculture of neo-Austrian economics, a lot of us are also interested about the ability to structure new forms of digital markets, make money programmatic, and increase the structural privacy of the internet.