15 ms·

I wonder what the equivalent of this is today. What are people saying will NEVER happen? Maybe self-driving cars?

by n7c3c1 11y ago

api 11y ago
Cryptocurrency for real-world mainstream commerce would get my vote. That will NEVER happen. It's only for buying pot, right?
- RexRollman 11y ago
  My viewpoint is that things like Bitcoin are little more than cryptographically engineered Monopoly Money. That said, I do believe that eventually, paper money will go away (if for no other reason than to track every purpose for government surveillance).
  - gnaritas 11y ago
    > My viewpoint is that things like Bitcoin are little more than cryptographically engineered Monopoly Money. Exactly like USD and all other first world currencies. Bitcoin is simply the next step in money.
    - rhino369 11y ago
      It's not a next step because the US dollar is monopoly money forced on you by the government. Also it's supply is controlled to keep the value steady. Bitcoin has nobody forcing you into using it and nobody controls the price. Bitcoins are just bits on a ledger that maybe someone will buy from you tomorrow, maybe. Even in the niche roles where bitcoin is superior to bank accounts, credit cards, and cash, there is nothing beyond momentum keeping people from switching to another type of cyptocurrency. That's why it's monopoly money.
      - empath75 11y ago
        I wouldn't discount network effects. I think a lot of people are going to build more and more services on top of the bitcoin blockchain rather than creating their own blockchain, just because it's convenient in terms of adoption and development and so on. And once those services are there, it's going to be hard to migrate them off. And that will eventually create some sustainable value to the coins. As to what that value will be, I have no fucking idea. I don't imagine that it will be a major currency. But it'll always have some use cases, imo. I mean your argument is essentially like saying: TCP/IP is just a protocol and anybody can switch to a different protocol any time. Well, sure. But they haven't. And they won't unless it breaks completely.
        rhino369 11y ago
        Switching from bitcoin to litecoin seems trivial. I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin, especially since the current number of big users is pretty small. It seems like 99% of businesses who actually accept it are just using a payment processor, which could migrate to a new system overnight. You can point to TCP/IP, but we've seen other protocols come and go. Back in the late 90/early 2000s's AOL messenger was dominate. Now nobody uses it. And that had very strong network effects, it was a messenger system.
      - gnaritas 11y ago
        > there is nothing beyond momentum keeping people from switching to another type of cyptocurrency. That's why it's monopoly money. That statement demonstrates you don't understand cyptocurrency at all. You're absolutely wrong, the difference between them is security, and that's something people value. And no, you can't trivially just substitute another crypto in place of bitcoin, other cryptos have neither the liquidity nor the security (which comes from the size of the network) to effectively move around the amount of money bitcoin can move around. > I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin Which means flatly you don't understand how cryptos work; no one who does would make that statement.
    - Frondo 11y ago
      It's not the next step because it's anti-democratic. It's a step away from democratic government engagement in the money of a country. Bitcoin encodes a lot of economic assumptions and values into its design, but there's no practical way for the people affected by those decisions to work to change them, unlike money backed by a democratic government. I don't need to know how to code to vote in the regular elections that decide how the Fed operates, all I need is to be a registered voter. The next thing after USD and other first world currencies will be something that gives more power to the people, not less.
      - gnaritas 11y ago
        > It's not the next step because it's anti-democratic. As that statement is wrong, so is everything else that follows. Democracy is built into the protocol, it is the very core of how bitcoin works.
        Frondo 11y ago
        Bitcoin is absolutely anti-democratic. There's no way for users to engage with the policy decisions implied in the design. No bitcoin advocate has ever said anything about my point other than "Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history, and doesn't even make sense in the context of democratic governance. I'll just note that you didn't even say that, you just said "yes it is! yes it is so democratic!" ... which, of course, it isn't, at all.
        gnaritas 11y ago
        Bitcoin is a consensus network, to call that anti-democratic is just absolutely absurd. It is the very definition of a simple democracy, whoever controls 51% of the network wins. > Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history Nonsense, winning in any democracy requires gaining the support of the majority. If your idea has merit, it'll be adopted when the majority of of the network agrees it has merit by adopting it.
  - api 11y ago
    I deliberately said cryptocurrency not Bitcoin, since I view Bitcoin as an alpha version of distributed digital money.
  - marcell 11y ago
    Tongue in cheek: I believe this attitude proves grand parent. Of course, only if Bitcoin actually succeeds :)
  - adrianmacneil 11y ago
    This viewpoint comes up a lot on HN, but it's missing the point. Don't think about bitcoin as an alternate currency, think of of it as a distributed protocol, like TCP/IP or bittorrent, which supports arbitrary value transfer. The media tends to focus a lot on the price of bitcoin, but in the long run the price is irrelevant.
scott_s 11y ago
I think many people still undervalue the importance and impact of online social networks.
- jonahx 11y ago
  Can you elaborate?
  - scott_s 11y ago
    I still hear and read people dismissing Facebook and Twitter as fads, as well as implying or saying outright that they have no actual value. I think that their enormous popularity has demonstrated that even if these two particular services eventually die, online social networks are here to stay. We're social creatures, and in retrospect, it's obvious we would use the internet to socialize.
    - Retric 11y ago
      I would call them bubbles not exactly fad's. They both don't age well with younger or long time users. Worse, there monetization strategy is to annoy users. So, long term I expect there going to be replaced with much leaner organizations that need less revenue to make quarterly projections or just shrink. So sure, social networks may be around, but message boards for example have evolved into some small, but reasonably profitable companies like Reddit. PS: Long term Facebook might try the MS route of buying enough companies that something sticks. EX: MS Access. But, that says more about Money than Social Networks.
SilasX 11y ago
Passing the Turing Test. Understanding consciousness.[1] Communicating human values to a computer so that it doesn't produce absurd judgments. VR simulations indistinguishable from reality. [1] Edit: people have different standards for this, of course, but something like, "where have a global, working model of a large domain in which predictions of consciousness aren't a special case, and in which people who study it feel like it makes sense and is less mysterious".
- Retra 11y ago
  Computers that can make ethical, legal, and moral decisions. Or ones that can do all three better than humans can.
  - andreasvc 11y ago
    Sure computers can make such decisions, be it with /dev/random or some sophisticated classifier. But we'd want justifications, and it's difficult to define what that entails. Moreover, what does it mean for a computer to be "better" at this than humans? The whole problem is ill defined.
    - Retra 11y ago
      Yes, it is ill defined right now. Are you willing to bet that it can't be properly defined? Or even that is currently is properly defined, and you just haven't been exposed to the definition?
      - andreasvc 11y ago
        I am saying it's not a technological problem, it's a social problem.
        Retra 11y ago
        You're certainly not saying anything useful. I have personally made some headway on this problem, and I wouldn't be saying it was possible if I hadn't. Your inability to find a workable framework is more evidence to me of your lack of imagination than it is that the problem is fundamentally unsolvable. There's a finite number of consistent models to explore, and one of them will give us what we want. It doesn't matter if you want to call that a technological problem or a social problem; the world isn't actually divided in those terms. So saying "social problems" strikes me as starting with a shitty model of what we are capable of. It's also just corporate-talk and there's no reason to expect it to be valid in this domain. The best that distinction has ever done is prime somebody to employ an actual problem solving technique.
ghaff 11y ago
I'm not sure anyone is saying we'll never have self-driving cars (in the sense of summon a car from an app). The debate is whether it's 10 years or 50+ years.

I wonder what the equivalent of this is today. What are people saying will NEVER happen? Maybe self-driving cars?

by n7c3c1 11y ago

I wonder what the equivalent of this is today. What are people saying will NEVER happen? Maybe self-driving cars?

api 11y ago

Cryptocurrency for real-world mainstream commerce would get my vote. That will NEVER happen. It's only for buying pot, right?

RexRollman 11y ago
My viewpoint is that things like Bitcoin are little more than cryptographically engineered Monopoly Money. That said, I do believe that eventually, paper money will go away (if for no other reason than to track every purpose for government surveillance).
- gnaritas 11y ago
  > My viewpoint is that things like Bitcoin are little more than cryptographically engineered Monopoly Money. Exactly like USD and all other first world currencies. Bitcoin is simply the next step in money.
  - rhino369 11y ago
    It's not a next step because the US dollar is monopoly money forced on you by the government. Also it's supply is controlled to keep the value steady. Bitcoin has nobody forcing you into using it and nobody controls the price. Bitcoins are just bits on a ledger that maybe someone will buy from you tomorrow, maybe. Even in the niche roles where bitcoin is superior to bank accounts, credit cards, and cash, there is nothing beyond momentum keeping people from switching to another type of cyptocurrency. That's why it's monopoly money.
    - empath75 11y ago
      I wouldn't discount network effects. I think a lot of people are going to build more and more services on top of the bitcoin blockchain rather than creating their own blockchain, just because it's convenient in terms of adoption and development and so on. And once those services are there, it's going to be hard to migrate them off. And that will eventually create some sustainable value to the coins. As to what that value will be, I have no fucking idea. I don't imagine that it will be a major currency. But it'll always have some use cases, imo. I mean your argument is essentially like saying: TCP/IP is just a protocol and anybody can switch to a different protocol any time. Well, sure. But they haven't. And they won't unless it breaks completely.
      - rhino369 11y ago
        Switching from bitcoin to litecoin seems trivial. I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin, especially since the current number of big users is pretty small. It seems like 99% of businesses who actually accept it are just using a payment processor, which could migrate to a new system overnight. You can point to TCP/IP, but we've seen other protocols come and go. Back in the late 90/early 2000s's AOL messenger was dominate. Now nobody uses it. And that had very strong network effects, it was a messenger system.
    - gnaritas 11y ago
      > there is nothing beyond momentum keeping people from switching to another type of cyptocurrency. That's why it's monopoly money. That statement demonstrates you don't understand cyptocurrency at all. You're absolutely wrong, the difference between them is security, and that's something people value. And no, you can't trivially just substitute another crypto in place of bitcoin, other cryptos have neither the liquidity nor the security (which comes from the size of the network) to effectively move around the amount of money bitcoin can move around. > I don't think the networking effects are that strong for bitcoin Which means flatly you don't understand how cryptos work; no one who does would make that statement.
  - Frondo 11y ago
    It's not the next step because it's anti-democratic. It's a step away from democratic government engagement in the money of a country. Bitcoin encodes a lot of economic assumptions and values into its design, but there's no practical way for the people affected by those decisions to work to change them, unlike money backed by a democratic government. I don't need to know how to code to vote in the regular elections that decide how the Fed operates, all I need is to be a registered voter. The next thing after USD and other first world currencies will be something that gives more power to the people, not less.
    - gnaritas 11y ago
      > It's not the next step because it's anti-democratic. As that statement is wrong, so is everything else that follows. Democracy is built into the protocol, it is the very core of how bitcoin works.
      - Frondo 11y ago
        Bitcoin is absolutely anti-democratic. There's no way for users to engage with the policy decisions implied in the design. No bitcoin advocate has ever said anything about my point other than "Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history, and doesn't even make sense in the context of democratic governance. I'll just note that you didn't even say that, you just said "yes it is! yes it is so democratic!" ... which, of course, it isn't, at all.
        gnaritas 11y ago
        Bitcoin is a consensus network, to call that anti-democratic is just absolutely absurd. It is the very definition of a simple democracy, whoever controls 51% of the network wins. > Just code up your alternative and get 50% of the network to adopt it," which does not mesh with any definition of democratic engagement anywhere in history Nonsense, winning in any democracy requires gaining the support of the majority. If your idea has merit, it'll be adopted when the majority of of the network agrees it has merit by adopting it.
- api 11y ago
  I deliberately said cryptocurrency not Bitcoin, since I view Bitcoin as an alpha version of distributed digital money.
- marcell 11y ago
  Tongue in cheek: I believe this attitude proves grand parent. Of course, only if Bitcoin actually succeeds :)
- adrianmacneil 11y ago
  This viewpoint comes up a lot on HN, but it's missing the point. Don't think about bitcoin as an alternate currency, think of of it as a distributed protocol, like TCP/IP or bittorrent, which supports arbitrary value transfer. The media tends to focus a lot on the price of bitcoin, but in the long run the price is irrelevant.

scott_s 11y ago

I think many people still undervalue the importance and impact of online social networks.

jonahx 11y ago
Can you elaborate?
- scott_s 11y ago
  I still hear and read people dismissing Facebook and Twitter as fads, as well as implying or saying outright that they have no actual value. I think that their enormous popularity has demonstrated that even if these two particular services eventually die, online social networks are here to stay. We're social creatures, and in retrospect, it's obvious we would use the internet to socialize.
  - Retric 11y ago
    I would call them bubbles not exactly fad's. They both don't age well with younger or long time users. Worse, there monetization strategy is to annoy users. So, long term I expect there going to be replaced with much leaner organizations that need less revenue to make quarterly projections or just shrink. So sure, social networks may be around, but message boards for example have evolved into some small, but reasonably profitable companies like Reddit. PS: Long term Facebook might try the MS route of buying enough companies that something sticks. EX: MS Access. But, that says more about Money than Social Networks.

SilasX 11y ago

Passing the Turing Test. Understanding consciousness.[1] Communicating human values to a computer so that it doesn't produce absurd judgments. VR simulations indistinguishable from reality. [1] Edit: people have different standards for this, of course, but something like, "where have a global, working model of a large domain in which predictions of consciousness aren't a special case, and in which people who study it feel like it makes sense and is less mysterious".

Retra 11y ago
Computers that can make ethical, legal, and moral decisions. Or ones that can do all three better than humans can.
- andreasvc 11y ago
  Sure computers can make such decisions, be it with /dev/random or some sophisticated classifier. But we'd want justifications, and it's difficult to define what that entails. Moreover, what does it mean for a computer to be "better" at this than humans? The whole problem is ill defined.
  - Retra 11y ago
    Yes, it is ill defined right now. Are you willing to bet that it can't be properly defined? Or even that is currently is properly defined, and you just haven't been exposed to the definition?
    - andreasvc 11y ago
      I am saying it's not a technological problem, it's a social problem.
      - Retra 11y ago
        You're certainly not saying anything useful. I have personally made some headway on this problem, and I wouldn't be saying it was possible if I hadn't. Your inability to find a workable framework is more evidence to me of your lack of imagination than it is that the problem is fundamentally unsolvable. There's a finite number of consistent models to explore, and one of them will give us what we want. It doesn't matter if you want to call that a technological problem or a social problem; the world isn't actually divided in those terms. So saying "social problems" strikes me as starting with a shitty model of what we are capable of. It's also just corporate-talk and there's no reason to expect it to be valid in this domain. The best that distinction has ever done is prime somebody to employ an actual problem solving technique.

ghaff 11y ago

I'm not sure anyone is saying we'll never have self-driving cars (in the sense of summon a car from an app). The debate is whether it's 10 years or 50+ years.