You are talking about crypto after the hype. But actually the idea before the hype was pretty cool. It was basically to allow safe payments around the world without any government control needed.

In my city there were a few shops that took Bitcoin back then and a cup of coffee was something like 2 Bitcoin.

Did you see crypto going away anywhere? Because I sure as hell didn’t.

The cloud was the dumbest hype because it changed nothing. Network services were now named cloud services, that was it.

We also got:

• cyber: the realisation that the internet exists but 20 years too late
• big data: companies snorkeling your data for targeted advertising and government surveillance
• blockchain: safe ways to pay your dealer and investment scams
• VR: the weirdest sort of corporate meetings and some cool game experiments

IOT seems kinda ok in that regard. Connect your microcontrollers to the internet to allow some extra coordination.

Whats the story on this? I had it in my inbox too a few days ago.

Some custom keycaps and a custom layout definition and that should be doable. The numpad has 16 keys.

I use a ROM with microg and it actually works for all the things I need.