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It’s not still the early days of blockchain

blog.mollywhite.net

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Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#101

Post by joosters »

TekMol wrote: post #45

Depends on how you define early. When comparing the situation of crypto to the internet, I would say we are at around 1997 now. 1996 was the year when Yahoo went public and 2021 was the year when Coinbase went public. The usability of crypto solutions also reminds me of 1997. It is still so bad that it makes them almost unusable. Reminds me of acoustic couplers where you had to manually plug your cable bound phone in…

TCP/IP and DNS were both developed in the early 70s (1972 I think). That is more than 40 years before the first internet company went public.

Is that really your belief about how to define when a technology became useful?

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#102

Post by ryandamm »

exdsq wrote: post #71
obstacle1 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent article doesn't say anything about performance. Therefore this comment seems like a red herring. A case of not reading the article? The parent article's point is that most currently popular technologies found an application rather quickly, whereas blockchain technologies have been around for a long time (in tech terms) and still have not made ground.

Maybe you mean that they haven’t made useful ground, where useful is specific to you. Remember that blockchain technologies have become legal tender, have over a trillion in market cap, have become financial instruments traded by people around the globe, is taught at Universities and part of the CFA accounting exam, is in the news daily, has resulted in large investments in research, etc… It’s impact has hardly been…

When has "market cap" been a measure of a currency? This is indicative of the logical fallacy so common in these debates, conflating "store of value" with "useful mechanism for transactions."

It's a Ponzi scheme. There's no inherent underlying value, its "market cap" is strictly a function of more dumb money flowing into the system. Occam's razor, this is the most likely explanation for everything in the crypto space; the model makes sense and explains a lot more than "a new financial asset" hokum.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#103

Post by Dwolb »

magicjosh wrote: post #53
Dwolb wrote: post #48

IMO L1 (Ethereum, Solana, Fantom, etc.) development is closer to building out a communications or telco network. From that “hard” technology perspective, it’s very early days. And the apps that run on top of these L1s are fully limited by L1 bandwidth, latency, and blockspace. So, I think we’re in the pre-dial-up days for blockchains and will need a couple more orders of magnitude improvement to be (universally) on p…

Good stuff, so you would suggest to the author that their examples are too narrow. Perhaps that smartphones, Uber, and Facebook all represented somewhat minor "time has come" type innovations, whereas you see Bitcoin as a development more like the internet itself, and that instead we are in the Arpanet days. (Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)

Yeah narrow or just on a different layer/level of abstraction.

Yup my mental model is we’re either in Arpanet days or multiple-competing-DOS days.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#104

Post by mNovak »

The author's description of 2015 doesn't sound like some ancient era to me.. Have things moved on and changed so dramatically from ML hype, Microsoft Edge, Apple Watch, and ES6?

I'm not really here to argue about blockchains being good or not, I just don't feel great about how the article tosses out a body of technology for not keeping pace with Uber. It's a bit like saying it can't possibly be early days for reusable rocketry, mm-wave communications, or quantum tech, because all those things were being developed decades before some guy named Satoshi wrote a very popular blog post.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#105

Post by aiisahik »

The blog post conflates several issues together:

(1) why is the blockchain still so inefficient?

(2) why is the blockchain still so lacking in practical use cases with widespread adoption?

I think she is totally fair in complaining about (1). Either it is impossible to have decentralization and efficiency or it's just a technical problem that will be solved given more time. I don't have the answer here - only time will tell.

For problem (2), I think it's mostly an over-exaggeration of the use case(s) where web3 that beats web2. As far as I can tell there is one and only one use case: web3 can do things while having a middle finger pointed at major governments. Web2 cannot. In that bitcoin and eth can offer people of Argentina a some reliable store of value (against their own currency which depreciates at 50% per year) it has generally achieved that. You can't even buy a Tesla in Argentina so the adoption of that wonderful technology there is zero.

To claim that it's the next web2 or mobile tech is both an exaggeration and an underestimate. Web3 will not be much of a challenge to web2 or mobile. Instead it will be a huge challenge to existing political, monetary and taxation systems. It will be the tool of the rich to evade taxes, for libertarians to evade control and for those living in high inflation countries to build wealth.

Those who complain that this is hardly revolutionary are both right and wrong.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#106

Post by dmingod666 »

freemanon wrote: post #66
rsanheim wrote: post #52

I'm increasingly seeing "web 3.0" as basically a two headed beast: 1) a way to part greater fools from their money until the hype has died out 2) a hot topic to drive clicks and discussions for nerds and, increasingly, the tech press, from other more pressing issues that exist in terms of tech and culture and finance In other words, its a bullshit scam, can we please move on already?

i suggest learning it properly before jumping to conclusions. everything has pros and cons. e.g. cars pollute but would you want to go back to riding horses? judge less, learn more

Read the article by moxie on NFTs. It is so poorly designed that a jr JavaScript developer with 6 months experience would be ashamed of it. Don't "Go-and-lean" us. We are technology people here not your non-tech crowd that'll get scared and silenced by "go and learn"

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#107

Post by cuteboy19 »

Mistletoe wrote: post #49
codebolt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Zooming out and seeing the big picture' seems to mean buying into a libertarian vision of the world where the current money system is horribly broken and blockchain technologies are a viable and superior alternative. I profoundly disagree on all points of that analysis.

I’m not libertarian at all. I see cryptocurrency as a fair and transparent way out of the extreme wealth inequality we see in the world today. Decentralization gets me excited. New ways of using technology gets me excited.

cryptocurrencies are not going to solve extreme inequality. they are a transparent way to transfer wealth from new investors to early investors (aka ponzi scheme)

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#108

Post by randomhodler84 »

mikeg8 wrote: post #62
Dwolb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curve Finance with $14B locked to its platform. Serves up low slippage stablecoin swaps. Some background on Curve (and Convex): https://medium.com/coinmonks/convex-curve-curve-d7e28cd6c1d9

“Low slippage stable coin swap” is one of the most jargony things I’ve read on here in a while. Can you please ELI5 because I have no clue what this is or how it could be useful.

The idea is you can lock capital in a pool, and as people trade between two usd stablecoins, USDC and DAI, you earn a fraction of the trade fees. The low slippage is due to the pool being large enough that you will get $1->$1.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#109

Post by somebodythere »

poof131 wrote: post #98

A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. There is an interesting intersection between tech, communities, and economics. There exists a…

Every time a nascent technology bubble crashes (dot com, AI winter, crypto...) speculation gets reset, scams and projects with no future get wiped out, and the space gets healthier.

Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain

#110

Post by magicjosh »

ryandamm wrote: post #73
freemanon wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i suggest learning it properly before jumping to conclusions. everything has pros and cons. e.g. cars pollute but would you want to go back to riding horses? judge less, learn more

I've yet to see a "pro" for blockchain or NFTs that doesn't conform to the characterization you're trying to dispute. Care to offer one? I'm eager to learn.

I also want a writeup covering some examples of Bitcoin or Ethereum use that are relatable.

This recent NYTimes piece takes that approach, though none of the examples are that impressive: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/style/what-can-you-actual...

(Disclosure I own Bitcoin and Ethereum)

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