4 ms·
It's had a decade and it hasn't yet.
by jlgaddis 7y ago
It's had a decade and it hasn't yet.
- lawn 7y ago20 years after the invention of the light bulb, one of the most important inventions of all time, only 3% in the U.S. were using it. We sometimes forget it, but a decade isn't a long time.
- spookthesunset 7y agoLOL. And don't forget it took tens to hundreds of thousands of years after the discovery of fire to adopt the internal combustion engine. A decade is an eternity in the tech world. If bitcoin had a use case, we'd all be using it by now.
- mopsi 7y agoPayments are not "tech", they're finance. Things move very slow there. We can message each other peer-to-peer in real time with end-to-end encryption, but financial messages still move in batches over a 1970s centralized communication system, in plain text and in "near" real time (hours to days), with all limitations of those times affecting how business gets done in 2019. Judging by the finance industry standards, public-key authentication has yet to prove itself.
- hollerith 7y ago>only 3% in the U.S. were using it -- because it was impractical for most prospective light-bulb users to generate their own electricity and it took decades to build out a network for distributing and metering electricity.
- RandomBacon 7y agoAnd it will take a long time to build out a network for cryptocurrency.
- lawn 7y agoAnd the absolute biggest thing holding cryptocurrencies back is called the network effect. This takes time to build.