I'm not a boomer, and I even own a decent position in BTC / ETH.
The most "mainstream" revolutionary idea in crypto right now is automated market makers (AMMs) like Uniswap. These essentially allow anyone to create a "pool" to trade between two assets and earn fees from it.
You can tokenize any asset, pair it with a liquid token (such as ETH or USDT) and offer it to anyone to trade while you earn fees. Or you can join an existing, popular pool (such as between wBTC-ETH) and earn fees on any trades that happen on it.
Essentially, anyone can:
- Create a decentralized exchange economy
- Participate in existing exchange economies with any amount of capital and earn fees from it
The latter part is important because that's been the purview of banks. Countless trades happen between currency pairs daily. Banks earn all the fees because they supply all the liquidity. You can't participate in that market even if you wanted to (or unless you had tens of billions in capital).
AMMs turn that around. You could have $1 worth of liquidity but you can still earn fees on it.
This is the first time in the history of finance that creating and participating in exchange economies has been so cheap and accessible. I think that alone is revolutionary. It makes previously inaccessible financial avenues available to the little guy
A bank can legally process a person who fails to come through on a loan. They can physically take stuff. A decentralized crypto network can't do anything to anybody. It can just take the marginal collateral and then the rest swallow the losses...
I feel like defi crypto types discount the power of the physical world.
Loans in defi are over-collateralized right now meaning there's very little risk for the lenders. This will likely change as distributed identity/credit scores are implemented.
A couple examples of what's to come: https://cointelegraph.com/news/defi-s-critical-missing-piece... https://medium.com/minaprotocol/snark-powered-defi-teller-bu...