I think the key thing is that even without understanding the technology most consumers could see "before I couldn't get access to this information/correspondence/map/ticket/catalogue/advice/news/opinion/porn and now I can" as an obvious life enhancement in a way which having anonymous miners as counterparties rather than the company providing the service and their bank isn't (not even if expressed in terms of a 3% fee reduction). Whereas with blockchain it seems like it's often the evangelists not understanding the consumers: to use examples from the article, I really care that flight delay information is easily available which is why the internet was much better than call centres but I really don't care whether it uses a distributed database or not and wouldn't fly with anyone I worried wouldn't honour the terms of my ticket. I care that ridesharing services have good availability, routing and safety, I really don't want them to be transparent about my location and payments to any interested party.
Now, there are many technologies which are very useful for certain use cases despite the consumer failing to grasp what's going on behind the scenes, from Java VMs to graph databases to torrents, but certain things tend to be true of them
(i) they weren't as exciting opportunities as the internet even if billion dollar businesses were built on them
(ii) the developers explaining why existing solutions were good enough if not more optimal in many respects were often right.
Exactly – during the 90s I heard from a ton of companies looking to get on the web. They needed help understanding the technology but in most cases there were clear benefits from making things easier to find, customize, etc.
I’ve seen the same trend for blockchain evangelists to have gone deep into that technology but have only a cursory understanding of the businesses they’re trying to enter. A great example is the retail purchase model which always comes up in Bitcoin discussions, which ignores the fact that most people think credit cards are just fine and like things such as fraud protection more than the hypothetical chance of a fractional overhead reduction. There might be room there but it’s an uphill fight and the value is capped at the lowest Visa, et al. are willing to drop their merchant fees to.
I think your comment about selling tech is also important because the model puts some unusual constraints on it: you can sell to developers by focusing on tech details but how many developers are paid to work on problems which require trustless distributed systems and low transaction volumes? Most big systems require the opposite.
Now, there are many technologies which are very useful for certain use cases despite the consumer failing to grasp what's going on behind the scenes, from Java VMs to graph databases to torrents, but certain things tend to be true of them (i) they weren't as exciting opportunities as the internet even if billion dollar businesses were built on them (ii) the developers explaining why existing solutions were good enough if not more optimal in many respects were often right.