I have been actively involved in the space starting in 2017 but "Satoshi" and others published on SlashDot back in the mid-aughts (2000's) and a lot of software utopianism was going around then and before.

I co-founded, co-designed and built an MVP and 0.5 version of a scalable DDLT platform in Shanghai. The government forced it to shutdown and move to Hainan as part of the "changes" in policies in 2019.

I have been building software for a variety of purposes, including being part of the company that Google purchased to make money the only way they (and Facebook and Twitter, etc) could: advertising. And subsequently I spent the majority of my career on Wall Street building trading, pricing, and risk systems.

The short of it is: blockchain-based platforms are non-scalable and, contrary to what many of the starry-eyed believers, have no future beyond limping along as crypto that will never achieve what “Satoshi” intended. This fact is, however, widely known. Nevertheless, the number of attempts/projects to try to come up with scalable, performant and “decentralized” platforms is gigantic. And none of these efforts has delivered any significant result. The biggest and most expensive attempt (apart from Joe Lubin's) is DFinity. Even if it achieves the solutions for all the technical shortcomings to scale and appears to support “real” decentralization, it is still run as a private company backed by one the largest and most influential VCs in the world: AndreesenHorowitz. And they pay all the developers and hardware folks. So much for “decentralized” dreams. And the notion of “decentralization” itself is largely a fraud that is promoted as something that is really better described as fully autonomous perfect software. Only in science fiction.

I understand there is lots of money and attention sloshing around in the space. But if you truly want to be part of something good, crypto/blockchain/decentralization is not the place.