> "what are the use cases for this that don't include serious money getting involved?"

What people were trying to do back then was get it accepted as an alternate currency. It would be used for things like international money transfer, where the fees are very high, or online purchases, which wasn't near as developed as it is today. I used it as fundraising for my project, like GoFundMe but without fees.

Another proposed use was microtransactions, since bitcoins are divisible to 8 decimal places (0.01 microbitcoins). That would be for things like reading one article, without subscribing to an entire newspaper or magazine.

It was also assumed back then that the original Bitcoin was in no way "production software". It was supposed to be a rough proof-of-concept of a distributed time-stamp and record-keeping ledger (the blockchain). As it turned out, it became the dominant cryptocoin and the code never evolved much. All the evolution since then came from " altcoins" (other cryptocoins).

> "uh, I dunno, something something revolution?"

You either have never seen or are making fun of the forums where all of this was discussed, including several subreddits on this site.