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It’s not still the early days of blockchain
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Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#392The author exemplifies people in the digital field who are making it their life mission to criticize blockchain/crypto all day.
I invested a significant amount in bitcoin very early and am now retired thanks to that decision. My hunch was that it was the combination of interesting innovative tech and a vector for greed that would be unstoppable. I never talked about this publicly, very few people know. Crypto is not my identity. I honestly don’t care about whether it gets banned, disappears, or ends up replacing parts of our digital experience. I recognized from the beginning that it would be unstoppable, whether it was to be a net negative or positive contributor to humanity being completely irrelevant. You can’t stop an idea.
But since I’ve been watching this space from day 1, literally installing the bitcoin client the day Satoshi posted it here, I’ve noticed that people who criticize blockchain tech tend to be folks who could have made the same bet I did and didn’t. At the time I invested I worked in a tech company and some people were already going on and on all day about how bitcoin is a scam, etc.
These folks were aware of the tech very early, considered it a scam. And now they’re making this crypto bashing their identity. I think a lot of that drive comes from the frustration that despite the space having so many negative aspects, they missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. They personally know people like me. And now the only way to make peace with that decision is to publicly bash it constantly, to revolt against it. This becomes who they are, as much as crypto bros make it their identity too.
I don’t see people from the general public criticizing blockchain/crypto with as much passion as them. It’s only people from the tech field who go on personal vendettas against that space. People who had the tools and the information to transform their lives and even leave that space since… and didn’t.
As much as people who promote blockchain constantly probably have a vested interest in it due to the money they’ve put in it, making their opinion less interesting, the same is true for people who bash blockchain constantly because their vested interest is to make peace with the fact that they didn’t put money in it when it was really early.
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until 1998, my middle class American family didn’t have internet. I was a rather tech-curious kid, but until we actually had a second phone line run to our house and a new Gateway computer and a modem, there was this huge barrier to what I could learn about on our airgapped Windows 3.1 machine. My Dad was able to navigate the command line because he’d needed to on our previous DOS computer, so I feel like he could’ve…
I totally agree. We got the Internet in the mid-90s and by that point all the utility was totally obvious. Even using services like Wireplay for online gaming showed the potential very clearly. As you note adoption of the Internet is way more tied up in adoption of home computing and the exponential expansion of that. It was a pre-requisite. Blockchain tech on the other hand has no pre-requisites blocking adoption, j…
This is false. You can google what people said about internet in early days. Robert Metcalfe (the inventor of Ethernet) said: "I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse"
So people really didn't see potential in early days of internet, except small minority of people.
We see same happening now with Bitcoin and blockchain. In 30y someone will point into some (now small) project and say "people saw potential very early, just look at projectX which demonstrated that potential quite clearly".
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#394"Crypto" shat itself in the area of payments (noone really needs or wants it and it provides 0 value), so now they are trying other angles - NFT, DeFi. The problem is the crypto influencers are losing touch with reality. You could at least bullshit someone clueless about cryptocurrency and payments, but it's really hard to sell the idea of collecting JPEGs or investing into DeFi (which aggressively described in the t…
That’s not how it happened. Crypto is seeing a lot of technical advances. At the same time, people find different ways to build on top of it.
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wise (former Transferwise) is pretty much instant in the EU, with very low fees. Even then, transferring money with SEPA from my Swedish account to friends in Germany, Poland and the Netherlands is pretty much instant, I just don't like the exchange rate of my bank.
Wise (Germany->Poland) is the one who took me 4 days (Friday->Tuesday)... I have no idea how you did an instant transfer from Sweden to Poland.
It might depend on the amount.
Wise might not had the liquidity in your currency pair, and you had to wait for a transaction to happen in the reverse direction.
(Just speculation)
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you should be opposed to most basic (theoretical computer) science and mathematics research too that doesn't have any immediately apparent application. The scientific research to engineering pipeline is the backbone of our rapid technological progress. Basic research can target unexplored areas in a more organized fashion, allocating resources properly instead of industry's ad-hoc approach. Sort of like breath f…
General mathematics and computer science don't require burning energy on the scale of nations just to function
Neither do consensus protocols not based on proof of work. How many times do people have to comment that bitcoin is not the only crypto?
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the end, someone has power over the things in the real world, like releasing a version of the software or purchasing stuff. So everyone involved has to trust that someone at the least.
Open-source has the great advantage that it's auditable by everyone, hence the trust is distributed. That's a comment for open-source in general, not about blockchains.
Auditable in the sense that the code is there to read, but the percentage of people able and willing to do so is quite low.
Accepting pull requests is also limited to a set of individuals.
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is literally how research in the Universities makes it to the world. Spin-offs like Boston Dynamics are essential to building things that may not have immediate use but payoff can potentially be huge. We need to do more of this. Don’t throw the baby with the bathwater. I really don’t think generalizations of certain jaded experience and then seeing the entire world with the same broken lens does any good. Probab…
Except that university research does not tend to produce that many charlatans and snake oil salesmen. I'll keep my skepticism until this technology gives us at least one useful mainstream thing.
That’s just the downside of money being involved
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then you should be opposed to most basic (theoretical computer) science and mathematics research too that doesn't have any immediately apparent application. The scientific research to engineering pipeline is the backbone of our rapid technological progress. Basic research can target unexplored areas in a more organized fashion, allocating resources properly instead of industry's ad-hoc approach. Sort of like breath f…
Pour the same amount of money into math as people poured into cryptocurrencies then.
How can I buy math?
Re: It’s not still the early days of blockchain
#400I'm still very opposed to the idea of taking a technology and then searching a problem for it. Why? Back in 2017 during the first hype cycle, blockchain companies raised hundreds of millions with ICOs. I became very interested in the technology too, and some friends still work in this space. 4 years later in the web3 era, there is not a single product aside from trading/finance that got traction. Use cases like stori…
Brave has micropayments for creators. It achieved 50M MAU last year. In a few years it will surpass Firefox.