5 ms·

I used the internet in '95. It was awesome: I played Trade Wars with my friends. I received and sent email with Juno. I chatted with random strangers on BBSe

by mifeng 9y ago

I used the internet in '95. It was awesome: I played Trade Wars with my friends. I received and sent email with Juno. I chatted with random strangers on BBSes (a few were super weird, but whatevs). Despite the limited options and the slowness of my 28k baud modem, the internet in '95 still fulfilled my needs for entertainment, communication and socialization. Blockchain today doesn't fulfill any human needs.

wpietri 9y ago
Exactly. One of my eternal questions about shiny new technologies is, "Great, but who's getting value from it on a daily basis?" I keep asking this about Bitcoin, et al. For 6 years I've been getting, "Oh, it's just about to take off! You'll see soon!" The Internet was definitely delivering value daily by 1990. It wasn't just a technological curiosity. Email, Usenet, mailing lists, file transfer, remote computing: all providing the sort of benefits that let researchers and academics justify paying to connect up. I think cryptocurrencies and blockchains are technologically neat, and I appreciate them on that level. But neat technology doesn't always end up being useful.
- hdhzy 9y ago
  > all providing the sort of benefits that let researchers and academics justify paying to connect up. Well you could say the same about Bitcoin as it's current price comes from people willing to buy Bitcoin using their USDs.
  - canoebuilder 9y ago
    How many people paid an ISP in the hope that someone would pay them more for their account at a later date? If you're buying bitcoin because of some utility it offers you beyond speculation, the price doesn't really matter. You just exchange one monetary denomination for another and do whatever you plan to do with it. When you buy something like an internet connection or any other good or service you perform a cost benefit analysis. For example, if internet connections were 100x their current price, many fewer people would have one.(And interestingly for a network like the internet, the higher the cost to access, the less users, and thus less useful because of the network effect.)
- TylerE 9y ago
  The answer is simple. They created an artificial gold rush so they could sell shovels.
- jcfrei 9y ago
  The raison d'être of Bitcoin is that it makes the entire banking infrastructure (ie. the equivalent of the huge settlement industry currently in place to keep global finance running) accessible to everyone with a smartphone and internet access. Or think of it like this: Before the internet the knowledge you had access to depended mainly on the people and libraries around you. With the internet you gained access to all the knowledge in the world. Blockchains are doing the same with regards to the accessibility of financial resources and services.
  - evgen 9y ago
    Except for the unfortunate fact that the only parts of the banking infrastructure that people actual care about in daily life are already accessible via smartphone and internet. Once again, this reduces to a solution in search of a problem.
    - jcfrei 9y ago
      The full suite of banking services that are accessible to you (sending money to any person in any country, buying shares, investing in funds, mortgages, insurance, etc.) are accessible to fewer people than you might think. Most people from Africa, Asia and South America don't have access to such services. Access to a deposit account provided by their local phone company is just starting to become widespread (eg. MPesa).
      - evgen 9y ago
        People in Africa and Asia actually have access to better and more ubiquitous direct payment mechanisms that I do here in western Europe. Those systems happen to run through telcos and the phone networks, but they work well and are available to billions of people. These technologies get the job done and show that there is no need for blockchain tech in this arena. Please try again.
        jcfrei 9y ago
        Deposit accounts just cover a fraction of the financial services we regularly use in the developed world. They still lack retirement schemes, insurance and investment funds, etc. Blockchains (due to working in a trustless environment) could make these services possible in countries lacking the required settlement infrastructure and legal frameworks. The services provided by their telcos are also usually limited to a deposit account in the local currency. They don't provide access to international financial markets, ie. they can't invest in a retirement fund in London or buy Euros. And just like the internet allowed hackers to access information that their government censored, blockchains give people access to financial assets which their government could previously restrict.
- finid 9y ago
  The Internet was definitely delivering value daily by 1990 Yes, the Internet was delivering daily value in 1990, but only to a very, very small group of users. I was in grad school then, but the Internet was not a factor in my environment. Networking was carrying floppies from here to there. Same thing with cryptocurrencies. It's delivering value to a small group of users, though that group is much more than the small group served by the Internet in 1990. Mining and trading in cryptocurrencies have millions for some, so it's serving them well.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    Mining and trading do not create value. Like speculation in other commodities, it's basically gambling. Except that the markets for, say, oil futures let people buy insurance to mitigate risks in the underlying commodity that they don't want to take. But since Bitcoin doesn't have a similar underlying value yet, the speculation can't be justified as possibly creating value. The one group I have to admit is getting value from Bitcoin is criminals. E.g., it's the technology of choice for ransomware. But that just doesn't strike me as a use case that will help Bitcoin cross the chasm.
- api 9y ago
  Bitcoin is most useful as an alternative to awful systems like Western Union. The rest of these systems seem to be research projects at this stage. Not saying they won't mature, but they're not like the Internet in 95. More like the Internet in 75.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    Ok. Who's using it as an alternative to Western Union today on a regular basis? I live in a city, SF, that has plenty of signs up to attract people sending money back to their family back home. But I've never seen a single sign getting people to use Bitcoin for that. It's certainly possible that Bitcoin is like the Internet was in 1975. But at that point, they hadn't even invented TCP/IP, which came in '82. At that point, ARPANET was just one of many approaches to networking, including BITNET, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet. Not to mention the circuit-switched networks that were probably dominant in revenue terms. It seems totally plausible to me that Bitcoin and/or blockchains could end up as a similar "people used it for a little while but it's hard to remember why" thing. Or, worse, it could end up like the OSI protocol stack: a collection of exciting ideas that nobody ever really got working to deliver much value in the real world.
joshontheweb 9y ago
Perhaps this isn't on the same scale as the internet in the nineties but there are needs being met with this tech. I pay contractors in bitcoin. It saves on transaction fees and is really easy to do. It is especially useful for international payments.
RexetBlell 9y ago
It's funny that the examples you mentioned don't fulfill any human needs either. Why is the market cap 70 Billion? Because humans love to speculate. Couldn't that be called a human need? I think one of the really good applications of blockchain technology, is to build a system superior to DNS: https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ The names are assigned in automated way, based on the highest bid. The name auction is run by a piece of code (which you can see here: https://github.com/ethereum/ens/blob/master/contracts/HashRegistrarSimplified.sol https://github.com/ethereum/ens/blob/master/contracts/HashRe...). All domain name businesses (like Godaddy) could be automated away by a piece of code. That seems powerful to me.
kruton 9y ago
I remember the internet in '95 and it sucked. The modem was loud as hell, everything took forever to load, there was very little content, and my parents would yell at me when they wanted to make a phone call.
- Koshkin 9y ago
  I do not remember having any of those problems when using Internet at work.
Taek 9y ago
> Blockchain today doesn't fulfill any human needs. I am more than happy to disagree with that. Bitcoin is a monetary system that is fully independent of any existing financial system, and it's super robust. It's a great hedge against the existing financial system. It offers permanent, irreversible settlement in under an hour, with payments to anywhere in the world. It offers irreversible logging and time-stamping, in a way that is programmatic and accessible. People are using this today, every day and gaining value out of it. It's money that you can own without anyone realizing that you have it. Including oppressive governments. It's money that can't be seized. It's money that can't be censored. You balance can't be frozen because PayPal wants to run an investigation, or found some tiny ToS violation. Bitcoin has a huge amount of value that a lot of people are actively making use of. If you can't see that, it's either because you don't understand, or because you are outside the group of people who benefit from this truly unique money.
- j_s 9y ago
  Can you share anything about how BitCoin has met any of your specific needs (without violating your privacy or anything, no pressure). It all sounds great, in theory. I'm more interested in how it works out in practice though.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Taek 9y ago
    I've had my credit card frozen while traveling abroad. Was able to get by on bitcoin. I've gotten refunds for things like plane tickets in bitcoin too. Way easier than setting up bank stuff or proving mailing addresses for checks, or going through the hassle of having them pick your flights, etc. These are all first world use cases though. I also keep Bitcoin in case of substantial problems. The financial system melting, war, discrimination, or political change that might threaten the life I lead. It also gives me independence in a way you can't get anywhere else. The US uses it's status as the world's reserve currency to make a lot of political moves. The USD is a huge engine for pushing US agenda. Bitcoin operates outside of that, and this is something I find valuable, and it makes it easier for me to sleep at night.

by mifeng 9y ago

wpietri 9y ago

Exactly. One of my eternal questions about shiny new technologies is, "Great, but who's getting value from it on a daily basis?" I keep asking this about Bitcoin, et al. For 6 years I've been getting, "Oh, it's just about to take off! You'll see soon!" The Internet was definitely delivering value daily by 1990. It wasn't just a technological curiosity. Email, Usenet, mailing lists, file transfer, remote computing: all providing the sort of benefits that let researchers and academics justify paying to connect up. I think cryptocurrencies and blockchains are technologically neat, and I appreciate them on that level. But neat technology doesn't always end up being useful.

hdhzy 9y ago
> all providing the sort of benefits that let researchers and academics justify paying to connect up. Well you could say the same about Bitcoin as it's current price comes from people willing to buy Bitcoin using their USDs.
- canoebuilder 9y ago
  How many people paid an ISP in the hope that someone would pay them more for their account at a later date? If you're buying bitcoin because of some utility it offers you beyond speculation, the price doesn't really matter. You just exchange one monetary denomination for another and do whatever you plan to do with it. When you buy something like an internet connection or any other good or service you perform a cost benefit analysis. For example, if internet connections were 100x their current price, many fewer people would have one.(And interestingly for a network like the internet, the higher the cost to access, the less users, and thus less useful because of the network effect.)
TylerE 9y ago
The answer is simple. They created an artificial gold rush so they could sell shovels.
jcfrei 9y ago
The raison d'être of Bitcoin is that it makes the entire banking infrastructure (ie. the equivalent of the huge settlement industry currently in place to keep global finance running) accessible to everyone with a smartphone and internet access. Or think of it like this: Before the internet the knowledge you had access to depended mainly on the people and libraries around you. With the internet you gained access to all the knowledge in the world. Blockchains are doing the same with regards to the accessibility of financial resources and services.
- evgen 9y ago
  Except for the unfortunate fact that the only parts of the banking infrastructure that people actual care about in daily life are already accessible via smartphone and internet. Once again, this reduces to a solution in search of a problem.
  - jcfrei 9y ago
    The full suite of banking services that are accessible to you (sending money to any person in any country, buying shares, investing in funds, mortgages, insurance, etc.) are accessible to fewer people than you might think. Most people from Africa, Asia and South America don't have access to such services. Access to a deposit account provided by their local phone company is just starting to become widespread (eg. MPesa).
    - evgen 9y ago
      People in Africa and Asia actually have access to better and more ubiquitous direct payment mechanisms that I do here in western Europe. Those systems happen to run through telcos and the phone networks, but they work well and are available to billions of people. These technologies get the job done and show that there is no need for blockchain tech in this arena. Please try again.
      - jcfrei 9y ago
        Deposit accounts just cover a fraction of the financial services we regularly use in the developed world. They still lack retirement schemes, insurance and investment funds, etc. Blockchains (due to working in a trustless environment) could make these services possible in countries lacking the required settlement infrastructure and legal frameworks. The services provided by their telcos are also usually limited to a deposit account in the local currency. They don't provide access to international financial markets, ie. they can't invest in a retirement fund in London or buy Euros. And just like the internet allowed hackers to access information that their government censored, blockchains give people access to financial assets which their government could previously restrict.
finid 9y ago
The Internet was definitely delivering value daily by 1990 Yes, the Internet was delivering daily value in 1990, but only to a very, very small group of users. I was in grad school then, but the Internet was not a factor in my environment. Networking was carrying floppies from here to there. Same thing with cryptocurrencies. It's delivering value to a small group of users, though that group is much more than the small group served by the Internet in 1990. Mining and trading in cryptocurrencies have millions for some, so it's serving them well.
- wpietri 9y ago
  Mining and trading do not create value. Like speculation in other commodities, it's basically gambling. Except that the markets for, say, oil futures let people buy insurance to mitigate risks in the underlying commodity that they don't want to take. But since Bitcoin doesn't have a similar underlying value yet, the speculation can't be justified as possibly creating value. The one group I have to admit is getting value from Bitcoin is criminals. E.g., it's the technology of choice for ransomware. But that just doesn't strike me as a use case that will help Bitcoin cross the chasm.
api 9y ago
Bitcoin is most useful as an alternative to awful systems like Western Union. The rest of these systems seem to be research projects at this stage. Not saying they won't mature, but they're not like the Internet in 95. More like the Internet in 75.
- wpietri 9y ago
  Ok. Who's using it as an alternative to Western Union today on a regular basis? I live in a city, SF, that has plenty of signs up to attract people sending money back to their family back home. But I've never seen a single sign getting people to use Bitcoin for that. It's certainly possible that Bitcoin is like the Internet was in 1975. But at that point, they hadn't even invented TCP/IP, which came in '82. At that point, ARPANET was just one of many approaches to networking, including BITNET, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet. Not to mention the circuit-switched networks that were probably dominant in revenue terms. It seems totally plausible to me that Bitcoin and/or blockchains could end up as a similar "people used it for a little while but it's hard to remember why" thing. Or, worse, it could end up like the OSI protocol stack: a collection of exciting ideas that nobody ever really got working to deliver much value in the real world.

joshontheweb 9y ago

Perhaps this isn't on the same scale as the internet in the nineties but there are needs being met with this tech. I pay contractors in bitcoin. It saves on transaction fees and is really easy to do. It is especially useful for international payments.

RexetBlell 9y ago

It's funny that the examples you mentioned don't fulfill any human needs either. Why is the market cap 70 Billion? Because humans love to speculate. Couldn't that be called a human need? I think one of the really good applications of blockchain technology, is to build a system superior to DNS: https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/ The names are assigned in automated way, based on the highest bid. The name auction is run by a piece of code (which you can see here: https://github.com/ethereum/ens/blob/master/contracts/HashRegistrarSimplified.sol https://github.com/ethereum/ens/blob/master/contracts/HashRe...). All domain name businesses (like Godaddy) could be automated away by a piece of code. That seems powerful to me.

kruton 9y ago

I remember the internet in '95 and it sucked. The modem was loud as hell, everything took forever to load, there was very little content, and my parents would yell at me when they wanted to make a phone call.

Koshkin 9y ago
I do not remember having any of those problems when using Internet at work.

Taek 9y ago

> Blockchain today doesn't fulfill any human needs. I am more than happy to disagree with that. Bitcoin is a monetary system that is fully independent of any existing financial system, and it's super robust. It's a great hedge against the existing financial system. It offers permanent, irreversible settlement in under an hour, with payments to anywhere in the world. It offers irreversible logging and time-stamping, in a way that is programmatic and accessible. People are using this today, every day and gaining value out of it. It's money that you can own without anyone realizing that you have it. Including oppressive governments. It's money that can't be seized. It's money that can't be censored. You balance can't be frozen because PayPal wants to run an investigation, or found some tiny ToS violation. Bitcoin has a huge amount of value that a lot of people are actively making use of. If you can't see that, it's either because you don't understand, or because you are outside the group of people who benefit from this truly unique money.

j_s 9y ago
Can you share anything about how BitCoin has met any of your specific needs (without violating your privacy or anything, no pressure). It all sounds great, in theory. I'm more interested in how it works out in practice though.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Taek 9y ago
  I've had my credit card frozen while traveling abroad. Was able to get by on bitcoin. I've gotten refunds for things like plane tickets in bitcoin too. Way easier than setting up bank stuff or proving mailing addresses for checks, or going through the hassle of having them pick your flights, etc. These are all first world use cases though. I also keep Bitcoin in case of substantial problems. The financial system melting, war, discrimination, or political change that might threaten the life I lead. It also gives me independence in a way you can't get anywhere else. The US uses it's status as the world's reserve currency to make a lot of political moves. The USD is a huge engine for pushing US agenda. Bitcoin operates outside of that, and this is something I find valuable, and it makes it easier for me to sleep at night.