7 ms·

Sure. It's just a toy for nerds. It breaks often, is hard to use, has a limited audience. You can't do anything interesting with it, just put numbers and data o

Sure. It's just a toy for nerds. It breaks often, is hard to use, has a limited audience. You can't do anything interesting with it, just put numbers and data on it. Why would companies, let alone governments, be interested in this? Oh I'm sorry, you must have thought these were critiques of blockchain. I was talking about the first personal computers. What a terrible idea that turned out to be.

hakfoo 6y ago
The thing is, early PCs were solving actual consumer problems fairly early in their life cycle. Even if the problem was "I don't want to have to pay a quarter and walk to the arcade every time I want to play Space Invaders." Blockchain solves an interesting technical problem. The question is finding the right application FOR that problem. A decentralized currency is a good demo application because it demonstrates the problem well, but it fails to answer the question "Why is it better than a classic centralized system" outside of some niche cases. The existing financial system has left itself open for disruption, but that means there's a lot of potential for them to deliver the "faster horses" style solutions people want (faster settlement, lower fees, easier onboarding, less international hurdles) without completely scrapping the ecosystem. Conversely, if you want to treat today's cryptocurrency platforms as analogous to early PCs, what's their answer to the 1984 Macintosh, or a modern Threadripper workstation? By the time cryptocurrency's polished to a mainstream consumer product, will we have filed off a lot of the things current enthusiasts celebrate? Maybe "unreversible transactions" and "no-recourse self-banking" will be as quaint as "storing programs on standard audio cassettes" and "toggling in boot code from front panel switches"

7 ms·

Sure. It's just a toy for nerds. It breaks often, is hard to use, has a limited audience. You can't do anything interesting with it, just put numbers and data o

by doggosphere 6y ago

hakfoo 6y ago
The thing is, early PCs were solving actual consumer problems fairly early in their life cycle. Even if the problem was "I don't want to have to pay a quarter and walk to the arcade every time I want to play Space Invaders." Blockchain solves an interesting technical problem. The question is finding the right application FOR that problem. A decentralized currency is a good demo application because it demonstrates the problem well, but it fails to answer the question "Why is it better than a classic centralized system" outside of some niche cases. The existing financial system has left itself open for disruption, but that means there's a lot of potential for them to deliver the "faster horses" style solutions people want (faster settlement, lower fees, easier onboarding, less international hurdles) without completely scrapping the ecosystem. Conversely, if you want to treat today's cryptocurrency platforms as analogous to early PCs, what's their answer to the 1984 Macintosh, or a modern Threadripper workstation? By the time cryptocurrency's polished to a mainstream consumer product, will we have filed off a lot of the things current enthusiasts celebrate? Maybe "unreversible transactions" and "no-recourse self-banking" will be as quaint as "storing programs on standard audio cassettes" and "toggling in boot code from front panel switches"