No, no one is forgetting they're built on cryptography. It just doesn't matter. The underlying technology of a thing doesn't have much bearing on the properties of the thing as far as practical usage goes.
You don't care what your car is made of as long as it has good fuel efficiency and crash rating. Steel ceramic and aluminum are just tools to that end.

Research into cryptocurrency started long before 2008. Academics and odd crypto enthusiasts have been working on it since the 80s.
The intent from the beginning has been a mix of curiosity, paranoia, and buying drugs.
Bitcoin was hardly a "for the people" project. It was initially used almost entirely for black market purchases, largely via silk road. "The people" did not give a fuck about perfect anonymous digital cash. It solved a problem that most people didn't and still don't have.
The adoption order was: Math nerds > drug lords > finance > small investors. It's still not actually adopted as currency by people.
When you create a thing for the purpose of making monetary transactions untraceable, and your first major users are all using it to hide where their money came from from the government, it's really fair to say that you created a money laundering tool.

Bitcoin wasn't taken over by finance people, they're the reason it didn't taper out like previous cryptocurrencies, which either fizzled or were shutdown for being nuggets of financial crime.

It's really not proving much of anything. These new "concepts" and "paradigms" are nothing more than buzzwords thrown onto old concepts. Every scam is a scam that's been done before even if there's a new layer of glittery wrapping paper over it. Who're you trying to convince more, the potential suckers or yourself?

I keep saying that humanity's toys do evolve spectacularly while humans are still working on the same basic impulses they've been dealing with for millennia.

Trump is a petty conman who does everything in his power to consolidate as much power in himself as he possibly can so that he can funnel as much money to himself and his gang as he can. That's not new. The environment he's doing in may be more complex, or differently set up than in previous iterations, but the core is depressingly mundane.

Gaza is just people hating people and other people supporting different sides while all sides give each other more reasons to hate each other perpetually, some more war-crimey, some less so. Tragic,, quagmired to hell and back, but not groundbreaking in and of itself.

As for AI, the framework is the usual capitalists trying to convince everybody that their new best revolutionary thing is a word sorting machine that can sort very, very many words now very fast. Trying to cash in on the hype is the eternal constant, the occasion this time is a very sophisticated chatbot/image generator based on all the materials the inventors could get away with stealing.

And climate stuff is just this generation of capitalists stripping the planet for parts while they can get away with it. The scale is bigger, but vulture capitalism is also not even remotely new.

Just like the principle of singular attributability of data via the blockchain is a fancy way of assigning stuff to one recipient. We've had approaches to this before. This time the blockchain's ledger system is the big new anchor for the human element, which will invariably at first be either grifters or people who wanna bash in other people's heads with it.