Certainly expectations often outpace technology. The ideas you mentioned still hold validity although stuff like autonomous taxis are still not feasible (for the most part). And self charging is even a greater challenge.
But your point is taken: a lot of potential that went unrealized. Will we see it starting now? I am optimistic if people will focus upon building and providing services.
I'm not as optimistic as you start accounting to regulation, scams, security holes and technical infeasibility along with unaccounted risk. Eventually after 7+ years of smart contacts, most of the achievement has been #DeFi and #NFT which are in one phrase. Token generation.
I haven't really seen as much use like the arbitraging features por voting that where also other functionality from smart contracts.
So like a congressman said at one point. Most of the impact of cryptocurrency is tokens buying for other tokens. Which might sound too simplistic but as time goes by is often true.
Crypto greatest impact on the third world has been remittances, but credit is still a long way from being something people has got into, let alone, identity or traceability of supply chain.
Agreed.
Of course the major challenge is that everyone focused upon market pricing and few services were built, including what you point to. So we are stuck with those who were looking for the quick hit and easy money.
People in the industry do not seem to understand value capture and what that means.
So now we go back to look what people are building, most of the space including smart contacts are just new market making features. Whenever is NFT, ENS, Inscriptions, DeFi and value taking markets that make the crypto world more complex but also gets further away from the real world IMO.
Is way more exciting to create new protocols, new platforms, marketplaces and specs than to bridge crypto with payment hubs so that farmers can sell their milk or eggs. Or that the wine bottles are tokenized or that the 2 million refugees in congo can get their identity registered on the Blockchain.
I'm sure there are devs that want to tackle this projects for recognition. But realize that sometimes this problems are way more complicated than write some lines of code. And other moving pieces need to happen in order to achieve the goal.
The development you describe is being done. What I fear is we are seeing that come from the VC funded crowd, which means nothing more than another constructed system where a few are able to pull the strings.
Alas, open source does spread in the end. It just takes a lot of time.