Imagine HackerNews existed in 1992, as an NNTP newsgroup, and reported stories about this new thing called the World Wide Web being developped by Berners-Lee. I

Imagine HackerNews existed in 1992, as an NNTP newsgroup, and reported stories about this new thing called the World Wide Web being developped by Berners-Lee. I wasn't there at the time, but I imagine that only a fraction of the people at the time understood the revolutionary capabilities of this technology, while most were indifferent, and perhaps, like you, a little annoyed if the WWW was repeatedly mentioned to you in a short timespan. Of course we all know how significant the WWW turned out to be to human society in the next decade and later. Well, IMHO, what is happening today in 2011 with Bitcoin is the same thing. When I first read about Bitcoin, I skimmed over it, thought it was a scam. Then it was mentioned to me again, and again, became curious, stumbled upon the white paper by accident (http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf), read it, and was amazed by the concepts, the design, the suprising capabilities offered by its clever use of cryptography. This is so different and so far ahead from any monetary system that exists today that I, for one, believe that Bitcoin is potentially as revolutionary as the WWW. The very fact we see so many submissions from different people about Bitcoin (the top 8 submission at http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:ycombinator.com+bitcoin http://www.google.com/search?q=+site:ycombinator.com+bitcoin are from 7 different HN accounts, so it is not like there is a core group of fanboys spamming HN), and the fact that HN is a community with a high concentration of smart folks, shows that Bitcoin is certainly onto something... In fact, a seemingly overabundance of submissions for a specific technology is exactly one thing I would recognize as a sign of the potentially next WWW-level revolutionary tech... Mark my words. Come back to this post 10 years from now :-)