to allow those who could not safely transact for fear of their government to transact
It doesn't solve that problem either. For example, I sold 99.9% of my BTCs, because of new KYC/AML regulations, since 2025. I still have some coins, just to play with them, if needed, and Bitcoin is still a very interesting project, from the programming perspective, but it will be harder and harder to use it in practice, without having your ID checked by someone.
Definitely agree, but this was the reason Bitcoin was invented.
The problem, which is really solved, is just a double spending problem.
You don't need blockchain to do that. Computers have been solving this problem since the 1950s.
And then programming would be dragged backwards in progress by about 40 years.
We are getting there, but not because of Bitcoin. Recently, the "magic box, that can do everything" is Artificial Intelligence. Blockchain-based ideas will soon hit their limits, if people will find out, that transactions have fees, and if you do a lot of computations, without batching anything, then you have to pay a lot of money for doing that. Also, AI-based models will hit a different limits, when people will notice, that "AI programmed by AI" is not the best way to do things, and can lead to more and more dumb models, which will just turn everything into some kind of echo chamber, where the same data will be just processed over and over again, without adding anything creative.
I agree about AI being the new buzzword-de-jour, but at least there's... there there. Broadly speaking, AI is really just increasingly complicated algorithms that rely on an increasing amount of available data. There's nothing wrong with that basic idea, even if it's misunderstood, overhyped, etc. Blockchain on the other hand was created to solve one narrow computing problem and doesn't uniquely solve anything else.