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The internet didn't support millions of users after a decade either. Is the internet a scam? I'm not sure why you are saying all efforts go into a flawed secon

The internet didn't support millions of users after a decade either. Is the internet a scam? I'm not sure why you are saying all efforts go into a flawed second layer? a) Dozens of teams are working on other efforts. b) Many do not consider lightning flawed.

anyfoo 7y ago
The Internet was always at capacity. Until we had the pervasive networking we have today, there were always more people wanting to have Internet access more persistently and with more performance than what was available. Almost everyone who had the opportunity to use the Internet, would. As a result, enormous advances in technology were made to implement today’s pervasive networking. New use cases manifested immediately all the time. Nobody ever said “we implemented this world wide network thing, now we are looking for use cases”, there were, and are, always more use cases to choose from than resources to implement them.
- askmike 7y ago
  > Almost everyone who had the opportunity to use the Internet, would. I'm too young to have experienced this. But I've seen countless of clips and interviews of people claiming they would never use the internet because they can send post and use a telephone instead. "Computers are for geeks", etc. > New use cases manifested immediately all the time. Nobody ever said “we implemented this world wide network thing, now we are looking for use cases”, there were, and are, always more use cases to choose from than resources to implement them. It took a dotcom bubble to find the use cases we actually use today. Would you have not said the exact same thing back then about the internet?
  - Nursie 7y ago
    Nobody said that back then, no. They said there had been an over-exuberant market with people throwing stupid money at any old idea, but nobody was saying "the internet is a bust" or even "we don't know the use-cases" because there were a ton of other useful, successful things going on with it. You said it yourself - you're too young to actually know a lot about that, but you use it to bolster your arguments anyway.
    - askmike 7y ago
      > but nobody was saying "the internet is a bust" Many people were saying this, Paul Krugman (one of the leading economists) went as far as comparing the internet to the fax machine: "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." > You said it yourself - you're too young to actually know a lot about that, but you use it to bolster your arguments anyway. I'm too young to live through it, but luckily I studied it in university :-) Many people claim to know many things about history prior to their birth. I guess I'm one of these people.
      - Chlorus 7y ago
        > Many people were saying this, Paul Krugman (one of the leading economists) went as far as comparing the internet to the fax machine: And he caught a bunch of shit for it, even at the time. You keep trying to conflate critics of Bitcoin, many of whom have technical & finance backgrounds, with the largely non-technical crowd that didn't understand the web back in the 90s. > I'm too young to live through it, but luckily I studied it in university :-) What's the name of this "history of the internet" course(s) you took? The most historical context I ever got consisted of maybe a few intro paragraphs on Arpanet in my networking 101 class.
        vkhorikov 7y ago
        > You keep trying to conflate critics of Bitcoin, many of whom have technical & finance backgrounds, with the largely non-technical crowd that didn't understand the web back in the 90s. People today are as illiterate about economics as they were about the Internet back in the 90s. Just look around and see how many people know what Austrian econ is.
        askmike 7y ago
        "Media history" would be the English translation. It wasn't about the technical origins of the internet which are irrelevant in this discussion. They studied the impact on a few big media inventions (printing press, TV and the internet) on (western) culture. It seems you don't believe I had this in University? You can find some information here: https://docplayer.nl/2209094-Studiegids-2013-2014-communication-and-multimedia-design-creating-tomorrow.html https://docplayer.nl/2209094-Studiegids-2013-2014-communicat... The subject is called "Mediageschiedenis" and you can find it on page 37. This document is unfortunately in Dutch.
briatx 7y ago
The internet was scalable by design. Bitcoin is not.
arcticbull 7y ago
> The internet didn't support millions of users after a decade either. Is the internet a scam? The internet wasn't actively anti-efficient, making itself less efficient the more people wanted to use it haha. > I'm not sure why you are saying all efforts go into a flawed second layer? Because Bitcoin is fundamentally incapable of processing more than a laughable number of transactions, barely enough for a small town let alone the world? > a) Dozens of teams are working on other efforts. With nothing to show for it that isn't either (a) an objective scam or (b) not true to the fundamentally unachievable objectives underpinning "Bitcoin" > b) Many do not consider lightning flawed. Many people are wrong.
DagAgren 7y ago
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-but-bitcoin-is-like-the-early-internet/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu...

anyfoo 7y ago

The Internet was always at capacity. Until we had the pervasive networking we have today, there were always more people wanting to have Internet access more persistently and with more performance than what was available. Almost everyone who had the opportunity to use the Internet, would. As a result, enormous advances in technology were made to implement today’s pervasive networking. New use cases manifested immediately all the time. Nobody ever said “we implemented this world wide network thing, now we are looking for use cases”, there were, and are, always more use cases to choose from than resources to implement them.

askmike 7y ago
> Almost everyone who had the opportunity to use the Internet, would. I'm too young to have experienced this. But I've seen countless of clips and interviews of people claiming they would never use the internet because they can send post and use a telephone instead. "Computers are for geeks", etc. > New use cases manifested immediately all the time. Nobody ever said “we implemented this world wide network thing, now we are looking for use cases”, there were, and are, always more use cases to choose from than resources to implement them. It took a dotcom bubble to find the use cases we actually use today. Would you have not said the exact same thing back then about the internet?
- Nursie 7y ago
  Nobody said that back then, no. They said there had been an over-exuberant market with people throwing stupid money at any old idea, but nobody was saying "the internet is a bust" or even "we don't know the use-cases" because there were a ton of other useful, successful things going on with it. You said it yourself - you're too young to actually know a lot about that, but you use it to bolster your arguments anyway.
  - askmike 7y ago
    > but nobody was saying "the internet is a bust" Many people were saying this, Paul Krugman (one of the leading economists) went as far as comparing the internet to the fax machine: "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." > You said it yourself - you're too young to actually know a lot about that, but you use it to bolster your arguments anyway. I'm too young to live through it, but luckily I studied it in university :-) Many people claim to know many things about history prior to their birth. I guess I'm one of these people.
    - Chlorus 7y ago
      > Many people were saying this, Paul Krugman (one of the leading economists) went as far as comparing the internet to the fax machine: And he caught a bunch of shit for it, even at the time. You keep trying to conflate critics of Bitcoin, many of whom have technical & finance backgrounds, with the largely non-technical crowd that didn't understand the web back in the 90s. > I'm too young to live through it, but luckily I studied it in university :-) What's the name of this "history of the internet" course(s) you took? The most historical context I ever got consisted of maybe a few intro paragraphs on Arpanet in my networking 101 class.
      - vkhorikov 7y ago
        > You keep trying to conflate critics of Bitcoin, many of whom have technical & finance backgrounds, with the largely non-technical crowd that didn't understand the web back in the 90s. People today are as illiterate about economics as they were about the Internet back in the 90s. Just look around and see how many people know what Austrian econ is.
      - askmike 7y ago
        "Media history" would be the English translation. It wasn't about the technical origins of the internet which are irrelevant in this discussion. They studied the impact on a few big media inventions (printing press, TV and the internet) on (western) culture. It seems you don't believe I had this in University? You can find some information here: https://docplayer.nl/2209094-Studiegids-2013-2014-communication-and-multimedia-design-creating-tomorrow.html https://docplayer.nl/2209094-Studiegids-2013-2014-communicat... The subject is called "Mediageschiedenis" and you can find it on page 37. This document is unfortunately in Dutch.

briatx 7y ago

The internet was scalable by design. Bitcoin is not.

arcticbull 7y ago

> The internet didn't support millions of users after a decade either. Is the internet a scam? The internet wasn't actively anti-efficient, making itself less efficient the more people wanted to use it haha. > I'm not sure why you are saying all efforts go into a flawed second layer? Because Bitcoin is fundamentally incapable of processing more than a laughable number of transactions, barely enough for a small town let alone the world? > a) Dozens of teams are working on other efforts. With nothing to show for it that isn't either (a) an objective scam or (b) not true to the fundamentally unachievable objectives underpinning "Bitcoin" > b) Many do not consider lightning flawed. Many people are wrong.

DagAgren 7y ago

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-but-bitcoin-is-like-the-early-internet/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2018/04/05/debunking-bu...