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I can't tell you how excited I am to have an aerial drone deliver a keto-friendly pizza to my driverless hotel room minutes after I get out of a hyper loop stat

I can't tell you how excited I am to have an aerial drone deliver a keto-friendly pizza to my driverless hotel room minutes after I get out of a hyper loop station. Most world changing technologies have visionaries forecasting their effect, even in spite of the naysayers. You are correct that the presence of nay-sayers has no impact on the viability of a technology. But you're looking at the wrong variable. Where are the visionary descriptions of the beautiful future? The absence of visionaries, I think that has a substantial impact on how we should estimate the viability of a technology. When a technology has visionaries, technicians, skeptics, and speculators -- it has a real shot. When a technology only has technicians, skeptics and speculators - well, we will see what that leads to. As a technologist, the tech of blockchain is pretty cool. Distributed trustless consensus, Wow! As an economist and futurist, I've searched for good uses for going on five years now. There's nothing I've found yet to be excited about.

v64 9y ago
I agree with a lot of what you say, but I don't think we're at the visionary stage yet. Right now we're inventing TCP/IP. At that point, the best you could say is that we're developing technology for a global communications network. And people would reply "We have that, it's called telephones, and we already own the equipment today". TCP/IP alone wasn't enough to sell people on the idea of the Internet. We had to invent POP3 and NNTP, then eventually HTTP. Even after we had the web, people still weren't sold on the relevance of the internet, but at that point, we had visionaries who could start to paint a clearer picture. To compare them to the internet, blockchains and cryptocurrencies aren't even out of the DARPA yet, by at least 20 years. The point I was trying to make is that the Internet took more than a decade to really come into its own, and blockchains will take as long as well. Skepticism is welcome, but closemindedness isn't.

v64 9y ago

I agree with a lot of what you say, but I don't think we're at the visionary stage yet. Right now we're inventing TCP/IP. At that point, the best you could say is that we're developing technology for a global communications network. And people would reply "We have that, it's called telephones, and we already own the equipment today". TCP/IP alone wasn't enough to sell people on the idea of the Internet. We had to invent POP3 and NNTP, then eventually HTTP. Even after we had the web, people still weren't sold on the relevance of the internet, but at that point, we had visionaries who could start to paint a clearer picture. To compare them to the internet, blockchains and cryptocurrencies aren't even out of the DARPA yet, by at least 20 years. The point I was trying to make is that the Internet took more than a decade to really come into its own, and blockchains will take as long as well. Skepticism is welcome, but closemindedness isn't.