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Many of those are problems, not technologies. Saying Blockchains is just a technology is like saying Operating Systems or Compilers are just a technology. They

Many of those are problems, not technologies. Saying Blockchains is just a technology is like saying Operating Systems or Compilers are just a technology. They are an active area of computer science research. Many of the problems you listed are likely only solvable by large scale social movements. Solutions to important technology problems change the landscape over which progress is made but they are not social movements themselves. >It was just so much harder for people to abuse the crap out of us when the concept of a computer was something that, even if it could connect to other computers to get information, was not something that fundamentally relied on other computers and which stored all of its information on other computers and could be remotely controlled by other computers. The cloud is the new word for mainframe. The PC pushed things away from mainframes then the internet/cloud pushed back. Blockchains are interesting space between these extremes.

saurik 9y ago
I am pretty damned certain that the "important problems" being referenced here, and the ones we thought we would be able to affect in the heyday of computing, were not "we need to learn how to make a faster compiler" but "we are going to change the world". You seem to have conflated "interesting" with "important". If anything, we agree on one point: that computers failed to solve those problems, and where we thought they would--Twitter being a great example--they quite arguably made the problem much much worse. That is why I will argue computers feel so much more depressing today: we have been slowly coming to the realization--not just in the past few years but since at least the 50s (if not the turn of the last century)--that the entire concept of a utopian technofuture is probably a fantasy and dystopias now seem so close that we barely find the idea compelling to talk about anymore.

saurik 9y ago

I am pretty damned certain that the "important problems" being referenced here, and the ones we thought we would be able to affect in the heyday of computing, were not "we need to learn how to make a faster compiler" but "we are going to change the world". You seem to have conflated "interesting" with "important". If anything, we agree on one point: that computers failed to solve those problems, and where we thought they would--Twitter being a great example--they quite arguably made the problem much much worse. That is why I will argue computers feel so much more depressing today: we have been slowly coming to the realization--not just in the past few years but since at least the 50s (if not the turn of the last century)--that the entire concept of a utopian technofuture is probably a fantasy and dystopias now seem so close that we barely find the idea compelling to talk about anymore.