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“But it’s like the early Internet!” shouted the Emperor’s coinholders. “The Internet wasn’t yet useful a mere, um, thirteen years after its invention either.”

by pavlov 5y ago

“But it’s like the early Internet!” shouted the Emperor’s coinholders. “The Internet wasn’t yet useful a mere, um, thirteen years after its invention either.” I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this argument because they can’t remember. The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access. Email and ftp alone were killer apps. A bit later came Usenet and IRC and MUD gaming. There were things to download, people to meet, flame wars to participate in. People would stay up until 4am to get a chance to go online in university shared facilities. With cryptocurrency there’s nothing to do. You could pay $100 to buy a “cryptokitten” or whatever, but then you’d be stuck shilling it on somebody else somehow. The community is a mix of Scientology-like groupthink and multi-level marketing sales pitches. The early Internet was infinite times more fun.

dredmorbius 5y ago
An interesting line of argument, and one which affords a number of potential avenues for enlargement: - The Internet emerged from a community in which it afforded real and tangible benefits, without any one single locus of control. (Research universities, along with a number of government departments and a few major tech and defence contractors, principally.) Perhaps an alternate payment mechanism might emerge similarly. - The Internet tools which did emerge ... were well-suited to a small-world network in which local reputations could be assessed and acted on (loss of campus-based access with administrators overseeing populations of a few dozens to hundreds, rarely more than 1,000, through the early 1990s). Effectiveness at larger scales and in more hostile environments has proved ... problematic. - A clear statement of the problem(s) posed by present currency and payment systems is still lacking. Statements as do exist tend to be ... weakly grounded in emperical truth, strongly ideological (not necessarily a fault, but often one), and strongly resistant to actual demonstrated superiority after decades of effort.
idlewords 5y ago
I can't agree with your point hard enough. Really useful nascent technologies all have this pattern—they grow incrementally more interesting and constantly gain applications. Bitcoin followed this pattern for a while. But then at some point it started to regress on that axis. You could no longer buy a pizza with it, you could no longer mine it, and it got too flooded by scammers to use safely. There's nothing to really DO with blockchain unless you buy into the subculture. That's very different from early internet, early web, early radio, you name it.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Bitcoin didn’t regress, what actually happened is that its fundamental flaws ended up eventually dominating whatever early enthusiasm allowed them to be ignored. It was never going to work, for a variety of reasons that were incredibly apparent at the time. “Why did it regress” is much less interesting than “why did anyone ever fall for this?”
  - idlewords 5y ago
    Sure, but a lot of early technologies move laterally in some unexpected direction, and it was reasonable to expect blockchain stuff to do the same. Maybe the original idea could never fly (even in 2008 you didn't have to be a genius to see that evading financial controls would be the chief use of a working cryptocurrency). But likely someone would find a really neat twist on it and find the blockchain equivalent of VisiCalc, and that would happen again and so on. What's interesting to me is that the original idea was clearly brilliant, but never found any of those lateral steps. It's kind of a string theory for programmers now.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      There was no reason to believe it would move laterally, for both technical and social reasons. First, the underpinnings of Bitcoin are ideological, namely in Austrian economics. This means that any change that caused any inflation would be socially resisted. Second, most of the issues with Bitcoin stem from the lack of a central authority to do things like chargebacks and handle conflict resolution. It is not possible to solve many of the issues of Bitcoin without a central authority, and that was not going to happen for obvious reasons.
      - idlewords 5y ago
        Yeah, but when you took away the money part and just looked at the technical idea of a distributed chained ledger with no central point of trust, that was cool. At least, it was cool to me. It seemed like it might go in some interesting other direction.
Tomte 5y ago
> There were things to download, people to meet Same with LAN parties. I was thrilled to buy my first network card, and a tee connector. Even the fact that the first half of the day was mostly wasted with trying to get IPX and NetBEUI to work and TCP and UDP, and promising each other that we would not change anything until the next LAN party, and of course next time nothing worked either at first try. But it was fun nonetheless. (The second half of the first day was obviously swapping all those music and video files)
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Business, education, research, and defence users were finding 3 Mbps coax revolutionary for decades before LAN parties were a thing. Internet and Ethernet were useful immediately. https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/the-birth-and-rise-of-ethernet-a-history-1706.html https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/the-birth-and-ri...
- dopidopHN 5y ago
  I remember lobbying my friends to pool money so we can buy a router and use RJ45. Living on the edge ! My parents still have fond memory of seing skinny teenager bringing computers on well barrel in their basement to play video game. They were suspicious at first. But then they concluded they we were indeed playing video game.
- conradfr 5y ago
  The joy of discovering hours later why not everybody could "see" everybody on the network: ipx frame type, and different default values, 802.2, 802.3, pick one. You couldn't Google that. Because there was no Google, and you were stuck in a basement. Fun and exciting times :)
chrisco255 5y ago
Have you been looking at the Maetaverse at all? https://www.sandbox.game/en/ https://www.sandbox.game/en/ https://decentraland.org/ https://decentraland.org/ These are 3D virtual world environments and people are using crypto to build an online economy. They are trading property, buying virtual artwork and creating galleries, setting up clubs and meeting spaces, etc. You can also explore decentralized finance, act as a peer-to-peer lender, provide liquidity in a marketplace, fund an idea you're interested in, whether that's a game (https://illuvium.io https://illuvium.io) or a commission for a comic book series (https://www.one37pm.com/nft/art/punks-comic-pixel-vault-cryptopunks https://www.one37pm.com/nft/art/punks-comic-pixel-vault-cryp...) or start a DAO and raise money for charity or open source software (https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/).
- morelisp 5y ago
  > They are trading property, buying virtual artwork and creating galleries, setting up clubs and meeting spaces, etc. This all happens in Second Life and doesn't need to burn the planet to do it.
  - SubiculumCode 5y ago
    If you think these defi projects are hurting the environment then you have not been paying attention to the industry. Proof of Stake, what most smart contract tokens are moving to, is very energy efficient.
    - floatboth 5y ago
      Is anyone actually really sure that Proof of Steak is secure though? Anyway, none of this matters because Bitcoin exists and is the dominant shitcoin (due to first mover advantage). All these other shitcoins can claim whatever efficiency, but it doesn't matter because that's a very isolated view of the problem. The shitcoin economy as a whole will still be fueled by mining unless somehow Bitcoin gets dethroned and the whole mining thing just goes away. I can't imagine that happening without the whole economy crashing completely into the ground – but that would bring all these efficient coins down with it.
Graffur 5y ago
Pauli, what are you talking about? Bitcoin, Ethereum or Cryptokitties? What group are you talking about when you accuse them of "Scientology-like groupthink"? What comparisons can you draw? I think it's important you back up and explain what you're saying.
- ahallock 5y ago
  It's funny that these dismissive, trash-talk comments with zero value get upvoted on HN as long as it's against crypto. It really is a double-standard here. Ironically, that comment is also part of the groupthink.
  - bhouston 5y ago
    I think the issue is that mostly these smart contracts and efficient coins are not the main attraction. The main attraction is Bitcoin and recently Dogecoin. BTC is slow and costly and mostly a speculative play. Dogecoin is a joke, but also worth billions. Also these coins are speculatively often first, and useful second. Not all but many. Thus instead of being useful for exchange, they become methods of speculation. It is also used for fraud a lot -- both various types of pump-and-dumb, Ponzi and money laundering. And on top of all that it is usually inefficient. So what we need are digital currencies that are fast, stable, and that can implement smart contracts (but these tend to be buggy as hell with no roll back.) But that isn't what cryptocurrency is all about these days. It has been overtaken with speculation. If we could get the benefits I outlined, that would be amazing, but it seems that very few are actually interested in that.
    - floatboth 5y ago
      "Smart contracts" (public finance bots) are basically Ponzi-as-a-Service. Someone launched an explicit "PonziCoin" on ETH even. "It's just overtaken" is not a great take. The problems are way more fundamental – the whole concept of trustless irreversible digital cash just does not work in the real world for normal transactions.
      - 5y ago
mondoveneziano 5y ago
I am essentially pasting an old comment of mine: The Internet was always something where demand--and desired applications--were vastly over capacity and capability. From the moment computers were networked, more people wanted to do more things over those networks, and both infrastructure and underlying technology had to grow to barely keep up (or, in fact, could not keep up--many long desired applications only became feasible in the 2000s or so). This does not resemble the history of Blockchains.
- seibelj 5y ago
  Fees of blockchains are at times very high because the demand vastly exceeds their current transaction capabilities
  - mondoveneziano 5y ago
    In the case of the Internet, people were doing either new things, or existing things more efficiently (e.g. sending emails vs. postal mail and fax, or transferring files vs. swapping disk media or printouts). As the Internet progressed, efficiency increased. In the case of cryptocurrencies, people are doing existing things that can already be done quickly and efficiently vastly less efficiently, in a system that is purposely designed to be less efficient, where efficiency is in fact actively counteracted. Databases and online money transactions were possible before, at a fraction of the total cost inherent to the system and at vastly higher performance.
    - seibelj 5y ago
      I can send unlimited amounts of money, anywhere on earth, for (at most) dollars in a few seconds. I don't need to rely on any government for any reason, and no government can stop me.
      - mondoveneziano 5y ago
        The Internet provided solutions to technical problems, regardless of any societal/political considerations. They may have resulted, but as a secondary effect. When theorizing about societal/political benefits, take into account the societal/political problems cryptocurrencies created by inventing a machine that allows converting resources directly into money of miners' digital wallets without regulation. Your sending any amount of money, actual practicality and realizability aside, comes at the cost of a lottery, where miners perform literally 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 computations per second whose outcome is completely thrown away, unless they are lucky enough to be one of the 6 computations per hour that win. This cannot be made more efficient: If computing one hash costs less energy, the difficulty will be adjusted to require more calculations to keep the target of 6 hashes per hour. By the decentralized property of cryptocurrencies, it is by design not possible to regulate where the energy for this lottery is coming from.
CPLX 5y ago
You could book plane tickets. That, literally all by itself, would be enough for me to think building the internet was worth it. You kids have no idea how much fun it was to go downtown to a travel agent just to find out how much it would cost to fly home from college for Christmas.
- B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
  > go downtown to a travel agent Phones were out, too? ("You kids" should realize that most of the stuff done on the web today was done by mail or phone during most of the XX century, especially in a country as spread out as the US. Ring up the merchant with the order, sing out the credit card, done, was the MO from the 70s to the late 90s.)
  - CPLX 5y ago
    I mean, yes. You’d need to go get the paper tickets. Obviously there were variations on how people would do things and mail order existed but I’m speaking literally, that’s how we used to do it and when the internet came along it got way way better.
    - B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
      > need to go get the paper tickets. Darn, no mail service either. That's harsh.
mthoms 5y ago
The "early internet" comparison is usually presented when talking about how clumsy and slow the technology is in its current state. The argument is certainly not presented in the context of how "fun" it is. There's nothing "fun" about finance (and there never will be). In the context of technological state (how brittle and obtuse the tools are), the comparison between the two is right on the money IMHO. I once configured SOCKS on Windows 3.1 so I could connect to the internet over a 9600-baud modem. In those days, unless you were in Academia, you didn't know anyone with an email address. Early Usenet and IRC had very little to offer someone who wasn't a nerd. FTP? MUD gaming? Come on. You and I found the early internet interesting precisely because we were nerds to begin with. Don't mistake that sentiment for that of the general public. They mostly found it frustrating and boring.
- pavlov 5y ago
  Nerds, early adopters — whatever you want to call them, the online behaviors they pioneered became mainstream. In contrast not even nerds are actually using Bitcoin or Ethereum for anything that interacts with the real world. All proposed applications are self-referential shell games like NFTs, staking schemes, etc. If this is a superior platform for finance, where’s the real economic activity? Handwaving about “probably they use it in Venezuela” doesn’t cut it.
  - SubiculumCode 5y ago
    There is accelerating adoption of blockchain to manage cargo shipments, bills of laden, and authentication of supply chains.
    - knorker 5y ago
      Also git. Also completely irrelevant for any of the cryptocurrencies and smart contract systems.
  - mthoms 5y ago
    I'm going to cease to engage for several reasons: 1) You just flatly contradicted yourself without even realizing it. The top level comment said "The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access.". When challenged, you moved the bar to "Well, it eventually became useful to everyone!". 2) You're condescending "I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this...", "Handwaving", "Shell games". 3) You've got some internal benchmark about what qualifies as useful that appears to mean "if it's not useful to me, then it doesn't count" (see comment about Venezuela). 4) You seem to think of yourself as some kind of gatekeeper or authority on nerddom. I'm not going to change your mind about anything. I've been around the internet long enough to spot people pretending to want genuine engagement when they really despise your ideas and just want to publicly slam dunk on you. Not interested.
titzer 5y ago
> The early Internet was infinite times more fun. Holy crapballs, yeah it was! I remember when I learned HTML in 1996 and put up one of those blinkety animated GIF homepages on the hosting space given (for free!) by my local dial-up ISP. They had a local chatroom and I spent hours and hours chatting with locals from the same city--even met some of them! I read the hacker's manifesto and about phreaking and all of that stuff, found Usenet, played Quake over 33.6kbps dialup with a 300ms ping and still wiped the floor with people. I remember when mp3's came out. It took me 5 mins to download my first one. C&C music factory--everybody dance now! But that's just nostalgia part. The reality is that nowadays the internet is ad-laden crapware/spyware that is scheming every second of every day to get you to do something--sign up for something, buy something, like something, rate something. Your eyeballs, your likes, your hates, your friends, your vices and quirks, are worth billions to multi-national corps who hope to never have to give you customer service, who keep you at AI-defended arms-length, but will happily sell your attention (won through their latest crack-like invention) to the highest bidder. It feels like the internet is infested with the worst of human carnival barkers and con-artists these days.
- shiftpgdn 5y ago
  The early internet was overrun with this stuff too. Remember Bonzai buddy? Or the ad serving tools that’d claim to pay you for every hour you’re connected to the internet?
  - mandelken 5y ago
    Wow, blast from the past! I actually got a check from one of those pay per hour ad services more than 20 years ago, and to this day it's still the only check I've ever received :-) (It was 15 USD so costed almost as much to cash in Europe as it was worth)
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    I remember Usenet before Eternal September and before Canter and Siegel, when the backbone was NSFnet and before the National Information Infrastructure Act of 1993. If someone was doing anything commercial over e-mail or usenet you could contact their "sysop" or their upstreams and have them removed.
ahallock 5y ago
> With cryptocurrency there’s nothing to do Then you haven't looked deep enough or maybe the subject matter doesn't interest you. Don't extrapolate your experience to everyone else. I find the DeFi space and the scaling issues and layer 2 projects being built pretty interesting. Web3 and the protocols being built around that are also worth a look. Sure, there are a lot of scams and vaporware, but that's also true of the early and today's internet.
bryanwb 5y ago
Smart contract platforms are only four years old. Only in the last 12 months have we seen significant throughput on public chains like Solana and Avalanche.
bryanwb 5y ago
It is like the early Internet and you are like one of the old telco guys I worked w/ in 2000 who said people would never make phone calls on the Internet.
- knorker 5y ago
  I sure hope this MLM and tax fraud is not our brave new world. It's not that we don't believe it. It's that it's a dystopia.
  - bryanwb 5y ago
    Have you even taken more than a cursory look at Ethereum? I will get off your lawn now.
- bryanwb 5y ago
  I see I am downvoted by the newest generation of "old telco guys." HN is a retirement home.
fortran77 5y ago
USENET had nothing to do with the Internet. It ran over UUCP.
- deleted 5y ago
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ffggvv 5y ago
the problem is there’s always someone knew who hasn’t been fooled by it, and it can sound good at first. i remember i believed in it in 2013 before becoming disillusioned. but there’s people who first bought it in 2020 who tell me i don’t understand ot
- EricMausler 5y ago
  Smart contracts seem legitimately useful. Am I missing something here?
  - doom 5y ago
    They suppose both parties have equal power (money, ability to analyze the smart contract). I doubt most contract negotiations are like that. Signing a smart contract with Google, written by Google engineers, is like signing your own death warrant. You'd have to hire your own E&Y consultants to verify the contract doesn't screw you, and then we're back to the problems of regular contracts. Perhaps useful in 1% of contracts, useless otherwise.
  - ffggvv 5y ago
    can you give some examples of them being legitimately useful and advantageous compared to the existing financial infrastructure? haven’t seen anything where it’s actually needed or better. and basically all examples end up with some sort of trust needed at some point. such as gambling on the outcome of a sports game. it would still require a dependency on some sort of Api to provide the sports results and then you’re trusting the api to give uncorrupted correct results… which defeats the purpose of “trustless”
    - EricMausler 5y ago
      You are thinking way too extreme. An API is still a hell of a lot better than a sketchy bookie. I would trust the former and not the latter. Which helps break up the centralization of betting because it is much easier to establish trust in a 3rd party source of truth than it is to establish trust in someone being financially responsible / honorable. Will it improve the established market providers for sports betting? No. But that's the point. It enables people to make a small business betting shop
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ThomPete 5y ago
its not about interesting but about adoption. Crypto is interesting to anyone who spend time getting into it. Not for the same reasons and that is why the adoption looks different, but its there and that is really what matters.
Beaver117 5y ago
I maintain that the most useful feature of crypto is still crime. The Silk Road was the killer app.
- baby 5y ago
  Wasn’t the first use of internet to buy weed between two universities? Edit: first thing bought on the internet apparently was weed https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-was-first-thing-sold-internet-180957414/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-was-first-thi...
K0balt 5y ago
Hmm. It’s interesting to note that skeptics seem much more invested in being right about crypto being a scam than proponents are in it being here to stay. The more time passes, the shriller the cries of skeptics become, leading me to believe that skeptics are emotionally invested to the extreme in the failure of crypto. I rarely see any carefully considered, informed opinions just tulips and drugs and money laundering lol. You know what is used for drugs? Cash. You know how money is laundered? Banks. You know what is worthless? Venezuelan currency. Sure, crypto, just like any fungible asset, is used in these ways... but none nearly as much a fiat is. I’m becoming convinced that naysayers are more and more afraid of having been wrong and missing the boat as time goes on. Every day Bitcoin fails to go to 0, it gains legitimacy as a store of value and means of payment. I guess that is pretty nerve wracking if you made a hasty decision early on to pretend it wasn’t happening, and now it seems like you’re being left in the dust, still preaching from your soap box. It’s been more than a decade. It’s here to stay. It will get better, but it’s not going anywhere.
- tyre 5y ago
  > Every day Bitcoin fails to go to 0, it gains legitimacy as a store of value and means of payment. Bitcoin is a horrible store of value. It might not go to zero, but it’s fluctuates wildly. I think for people who predicted from a decade ago that this was all nonsense, the case is there that it is. Realistically, what are we looking at? What runs on smart contracts? What is being bought and sold with Bitcoin. This answer is not nothing, but…I mean really? This is the revolution? As far as legal uses, the only one that has any amount of traffic is speculation. That’s it. Are there other people using it occasionally for other things? Sure! But then we’re looking at, checks ledger NFTs? All of this while burning through tremendous amounts of electricity. We’re talking over half a percent of the total energy consumption of human civilization. What have we gotten in return? This isn’t like people pushing back against airplanes or paper or rice. There’s no denying that a lot of money is thrown around, but you can only talk about people being “left in the dust” if you can point to something worth, again, >0.5% of electricity consumption of the PLANET.
- roca 5y ago
  Every time a Musk tweet swings the value of BTC by 20% --- in either direction --- Bitcoin loses credibility as a store of value. "Price greater than zero" is not enough to make something a good store of value. BTC as a means of payment is a joke. Most Bitcoin fans I engage with have actually given up on that. In fact, the scaling limitations of Bitcoin transactions are now touted as a good thing because that bounds the eventual energy usage of the network. The Bitcoin cult is strong enough that I have no doubt Bitcoin is here to stay. It's sad, but it doesn't bother me. On the other hand it's obvious why Bitcoin HODLers have a deep financial interest in crypto being "here to stay".
strangescript 5y ago
I mean it took a decade for that internet you are describing to form in the 90s from its inception in the 80s. Even then, only a small fraction of people were participating. BC has value because it a limited supply of a unique item that can be mathematically verified, even if it never solves all problems its advocates claim to want to solve in the world. It might not have value to you personally, but it currently does to some people. Just like you might not value Micheal Jordan's rookie card, it is after all a supposedly limited supply piece of printed thin cardboard, there are plenty of people that do. Let's pretend crypto currency tech didn't exist. Your local gov't wants to develop a digital currency that is verifiable, devoid of simple fraud and counterfeit, and is completely traceable by the general public. All the smart people in the country would get to together and would come up with system that would end up looking a lot like block chain. The gov't would control all the nodes of course. They would contract out server maintenance (mining), charge fees on transactions (sales tax) and banks would hold your digital currency and give you interest (staking). Instead of stocks, companies would probably just issue, I dunno, something uniquely tied to them that equates to value, like a ... token? It's not much different from what we do now, it just doesn't involve a bunch of baggage paper money has been carrying around for hundreds of years.
- doom 5y ago
  Would the government mandate an inane proof of work scheme so that the energy usage goes up YoY every year?
ajkdhcb2 5y ago
Darknet markets haven't been fascinating since 2012?
Keeeeeeeks 5y ago
selection bias is so strong, that even if I walked you through exceptions to the things you don't like, you'd still fixate on those undesirable things, as if to say that the good-faith actors should stop acting in good faith and spend their time wagging their fingers at the things you don't like. But complaining about something without taking the underlying behaviors in good faith and synthesizing alternatives doesn't really offer much for the people who are looking for the good things. That's why you won't get many good faith actors interacting with this, because it's better for them (and implicitly, the negation of your premise that it's all scams) for them to negate your arg by building more and more new things with crypto.
nealabq 5y ago
I was instantly hooked on Usenet when I got access in 1982. It was sometimes useful and always interesting. I had to be careful to limit my time reading it so I could get my work done. It felt futuristic, here to stay. Bitcoin feels like a great experiment and proof of concept. And someday a useful cryptocurrency may arise from the lessons learnt. But it won't be Bitcoin.
dwild 5y ago
> The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access. That's quite an absurd statement to make. I can easily find people right now that find no interest in the current internet, it's literally impossible that in the past it would have been different with way less interesting things to do on it.. There's a huge bias in what you state. I have no doubt that plenty of people who got access at the time found it interesting, but the thing you ignore is that theses are the one that found it interesting that got access in the first place. Like sure email are incredibly useful, but to send to who? It's is right now that I can send them to 2 billions users, but in 1996, that was 16 millions... kind of much less useful, the chances are most people you knew, didn't knew anyone that was on it at the time... thus literally useless. FTP are nice, but plenty didn't used computers at all, sharing files meant nothing. I know so many right now that have trouble sharing files, yet FTP still exist... no chance they would have shared any in the past. You are now on that team, the ones that don't have any use for it right now. It's fine that you don't find it interesting, but please don't be that old grandpa that scream "get out of my lawn" please... > The early Internet was infinite times more fun. Curiously, I've seen tons of people having fun with cryptocurrencies, in different ways, you are just not part of it...
baby 5y ago
What are your arguments though? I see no clear argument in this thread besides “bitcoin is bad” which makes it look like most people here haven’t investigated past bitcoin.
nostrademons 5y ago
If you date the Internet from development of ARPANET in 1969, it really wasn't useful for 13 years after its development. For one, the general public couldn't get on it. Two, the early Internet basically consisted of running a packet-switched network on top of the existing circuit-switched phone network, at drastically reduced efficiency. That was the only other network that existed, after all. Three, DNS didn't exist until 1983, 14 years after ARPANET and 10 years after TCP/IP. Four, the protocols you mention also didn't exist until the 1980s, ~15 years after the technology was developed. I too got on the Internet in the early 1990s with e-mail, FTP, Usenet, and MUDs. I'm not actually an early Internet user. That'd be folks like my friend's dad, who worked at BBN in the 1970s, or the folks at Symbolics, who registered the first domain name in 1985.
- tetherino 5y ago
  Official start of internet is 1983.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
The comparison to Scientology seems apt in one sense. The CoS is known for silencing any unscripted commentary on the CoS that CoS does not control. They keep very aggressive legal counsel on retainer specifically for this purpose. Similarly, "crypto" seems to have a team of advocates present 24/7 online who actively try to suppress or counter any negative discussion of "crypto". It is like a Yahoo chat room devotd to the stock of some company. The company has a compelling interest to squelch that chat room. People donate to CoS as well as "invest" in crypto; this practice has tangible benefit to the recpients of the funds. These beneficiaries do not want the benefit to end. They wnat it to grow. The suppression of "negative" commentary about crypto online is frightening to watch because it honestly seems to work. It is some sort of community-based censorship.
sanderjd 5y ago
I definitely agree with the thrust of your point, but there was actually a period of time where none of the fun stuff you listed existed. Email and ftp had to be invented and implemented awhile after the internet was created. There was a period where there was nothing to do on the internet, it just predates most of us. But it was definitely a much shorter period and the killer apps were way more obvious even before they were created. It's still not clear, after all this time, what the killer apps even might be for crypto; it definitely isn't all the echo chamber speculation stuff that is all you can do now ("lend your crypto to other crypto speculators who can't do anything with it besides lending it to yet other speculators!"). Personally, I would like to be able to (legally!) program against my money and do stuff with it without being beholden to big banks. I think it would be cool if I could automatically send 1% or whatever of all my transactions to a charity of my choice, or if I could do my own "micro-finance" lending to farmers in developing countries, or other things like that which currently require a bank to implement it and me to use whatever they implement. But it is far from clear whether all this cryptocurrency and DeFi stuff is either necessary or sufficient to do any of this kind of stuff.
TimJRobinson 5y ago
I see you haven't gone down the decentralized finance rabbit hole yet. It's the most fun I've had learning and playing around with in a decade. It's a lot like early web dev but with money.
Siira 5y ago
Well, it's not like the governments have allowed crypto to work. Telegram's plans were forcibly halted, technically superior coins like Monero are banned from exchanges, and the elites (who ultimately benefit from the hegemony of the current fictional currencies) are continuously propagandizing against proof of work. Give it space first, then complain why it doesn't work.
alexyim 5y ago
I'm surprised to see this so heavily upvoted here on HN. I'd argue you just haven't explored enough around its possibilities. I just read this today. https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/1400459822080819204 https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/1400459822080819204 I think we're just beginning to get to the good stuff.

by pavlov 5y ago

dredmorbius 5y ago

An interesting line of argument, and one which affords a number of potential avenues for enlargement: - The Internet emerged from a community in which it afforded real and tangible benefits, without any one single locus of control. (Research universities, along with a number of government departments and a few major tech and defence contractors, principally.) Perhaps an alternate payment mechanism might emerge similarly. - The Internet tools which did emerge ... were well-suited to a small-world network in which local reputations could be assessed and acted on (loss of campus-based access with administrators overseeing populations of a few dozens to hundreds, rarely more than 1,000, through the early 1990s). Effectiveness at larger scales and in more hostile environments has proved ... problematic. - A clear statement of the problem(s) posed by present currency and payment systems is still lacking. Statements as do exist tend to be ... weakly grounded in emperical truth, strongly ideological (not necessarily a fault, but often one), and strongly resistant to actual demonstrated superiority after decades of effort.

idlewords 5y ago

I can't agree with your point hard enough. Really useful nascent technologies all have this pattern—they grow incrementally more interesting and constantly gain applications. Bitcoin followed this pattern for a while. But then at some point it started to regress on that axis. You could no longer buy a pizza with it, you could no longer mine it, and it got too flooded by scammers to use safely. There's nothing to really DO with blockchain unless you buy into the subculture. That's very different from early internet, early web, early radio, you name it.

ashtonkem 5y ago
Bitcoin didn’t regress, what actually happened is that its fundamental flaws ended up eventually dominating whatever early enthusiasm allowed them to be ignored. It was never going to work, for a variety of reasons that were incredibly apparent at the time. “Why did it regress” is much less interesting than “why did anyone ever fall for this?”
- idlewords 5y ago
  Sure, but a lot of early technologies move laterally in some unexpected direction, and it was reasonable to expect blockchain stuff to do the same. Maybe the original idea could never fly (even in 2008 you didn't have to be a genius to see that evading financial controls would be the chief use of a working cryptocurrency). But likely someone would find a really neat twist on it and find the blockchain equivalent of VisiCalc, and that would happen again and so on. What's interesting to me is that the original idea was clearly brilliant, but never found any of those lateral steps. It's kind of a string theory for programmers now.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    There was no reason to believe it would move laterally, for both technical and social reasons. First, the underpinnings of Bitcoin are ideological, namely in Austrian economics. This means that any change that caused any inflation would be socially resisted. Second, most of the issues with Bitcoin stem from the lack of a central authority to do things like chargebacks and handle conflict resolution. It is not possible to solve many of the issues of Bitcoin without a central authority, and that was not going to happen for obvious reasons.
    - idlewords 5y ago
      Yeah, but when you took away the money part and just looked at the technical idea of a distributed chained ledger with no central point of trust, that was cool. At least, it was cool to me. It seemed like it might go in some interesting other direction.

Tomte 5y ago

> There were things to download, people to meet Same with LAN parties. I was thrilled to buy my first network card, and a tee connector. Even the fact that the first half of the day was mostly wasted with trying to get IPX and NetBEUI to work and TCP and UDP, and promising each other that we would not change anything until the next LAN party, and of course next time nothing worked either at first try. But it was fun nonetheless. (The second half of the first day was obviously swapping all those music and video files)

dredmorbius 5y ago
Business, education, research, and defence users were finding 3 Mbps coax revolutionary for decades before LAN parties were a thing. Internet and Ethernet were useful immediately. https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/the-birth-and-rise-of-ethernet-a-history-1706.html https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/the-birth-and-ri...
dopidopHN 5y ago
I remember lobbying my friends to pool money so we can buy a router and use RJ45. Living on the edge ! My parents still have fond memory of seing skinny teenager bringing computers on well barrel in their basement to play video game. They were suspicious at first. But then they concluded they we were indeed playing video game.
conradfr 5y ago
The joy of discovering hours later why not everybody could "see" everybody on the network: ipx frame type, and different default values, 802.2, 802.3, pick one. You couldn't Google that. Because there was no Google, and you were stuck in a basement. Fun and exciting times :)

chrisco255 5y ago

Have you been looking at the Maetaverse at all? https://www.sandbox.game/en/ https://www.sandbox.game/en/ https://decentraland.org/ https://decentraland.org/ These are 3D virtual world environments and people are using crypto to build an online economy. They are trading property, buying virtual artwork and creating galleries, setting up clubs and meeting spaces, etc. You can also explore decentralized finance, act as a peer-to-peer lender, provide liquidity in a marketplace, fund an idea you're interested in, whether that's a game (https://illuvium.io https://illuvium.io) or a commission for a comic book series (https://www.one37pm.com/nft/art/punks-comic-pixel-vault-cryptopunks https://www.one37pm.com/nft/art/punks-comic-pixel-vault-cryp...) or start a DAO and raise money for charity or open source software (https://gitcoin.co/ https://gitcoin.co/).

morelisp 5y ago
> They are trading property, buying virtual artwork and creating galleries, setting up clubs and meeting spaces, etc. This all happens in Second Life and doesn't need to burn the planet to do it.
- SubiculumCode 5y ago
  If you think these defi projects are hurting the environment then you have not been paying attention to the industry. Proof of Stake, what most smart contract tokens are moving to, is very energy efficient.
  - floatboth 5y ago
    Is anyone actually really sure that Proof of Steak is secure though? Anyway, none of this matters because Bitcoin exists and is the dominant shitcoin (due to first mover advantage). All these other shitcoins can claim whatever efficiency, but it doesn't matter because that's a very isolated view of the problem. The shitcoin economy as a whole will still be fueled by mining unless somehow Bitcoin gets dethroned and the whole mining thing just goes away. I can't imagine that happening without the whole economy crashing completely into the ground – but that would bring all these efficient coins down with it.

Graffur 5y ago

Pauli, what are you talking about? Bitcoin, Ethereum or Cryptokitties? What group are you talking about when you accuse them of "Scientology-like groupthink"? What comparisons can you draw? I think it's important you back up and explain what you're saying.

ahallock 5y ago
It's funny that these dismissive, trash-talk comments with zero value get upvoted on HN as long as it's against crypto. It really is a double-standard here. Ironically, that comment is also part of the groupthink.
- bhouston 5y ago
  I think the issue is that mostly these smart contracts and efficient coins are not the main attraction. The main attraction is Bitcoin and recently Dogecoin. BTC is slow and costly and mostly a speculative play. Dogecoin is a joke, but also worth billions. Also these coins are speculatively often first, and useful second. Not all but many. Thus instead of being useful for exchange, they become methods of speculation. It is also used for fraud a lot -- both various types of pump-and-dumb, Ponzi and money laundering. And on top of all that it is usually inefficient. So what we need are digital currencies that are fast, stable, and that can implement smart contracts (but these tend to be buggy as hell with no roll back.) But that isn't what cryptocurrency is all about these days. It has been overtaken with speculation. If we could get the benefits I outlined, that would be amazing, but it seems that very few are actually interested in that.
  - floatboth 5y ago
    "Smart contracts" (public finance bots) are basically Ponzi-as-a-Service. Someone launched an explicit "PonziCoin" on ETH even. "It's just overtaken" is not a great take. The problems are way more fundamental – the whole concept of trustless irreversible digital cash just does not work in the real world for normal transactions.
    - 5y ago

mondoveneziano 5y ago

I am essentially pasting an old comment of mine: The Internet was always something where demand--and desired applications--were vastly over capacity and capability. From the moment computers were networked, more people wanted to do more things over those networks, and both infrastructure and underlying technology had to grow to barely keep up (or, in fact, could not keep up--many long desired applications only became feasible in the 2000s or so). This does not resemble the history of Blockchains.

seibelj 5y ago
Fees of blockchains are at times very high because the demand vastly exceeds their current transaction capabilities
- mondoveneziano 5y ago
  In the case of the Internet, people were doing either new things, or existing things more efficiently (e.g. sending emails vs. postal mail and fax, or transferring files vs. swapping disk media or printouts). As the Internet progressed, efficiency increased. In the case of cryptocurrencies, people are doing existing things that can already be done quickly and efficiently vastly less efficiently, in a system that is purposely designed to be less efficient, where efficiency is in fact actively counteracted. Databases and online money transactions were possible before, at a fraction of the total cost inherent to the system and at vastly higher performance.
  - seibelj 5y ago
    I can send unlimited amounts of money, anywhere on earth, for (at most) dollars in a few seconds. I don't need to rely on any government for any reason, and no government can stop me.
    - mondoveneziano 5y ago
      The Internet provided solutions to technical problems, regardless of any societal/political considerations. They may have resulted, but as a secondary effect. When theorizing about societal/political benefits, take into account the societal/political problems cryptocurrencies created by inventing a machine that allows converting resources directly into money of miners' digital wallets without regulation. Your sending any amount of money, actual practicality and realizability aside, comes at the cost of a lottery, where miners perform literally 100.000.000.000.000.000.000 computations per second whose outcome is completely thrown away, unless they are lucky enough to be one of the 6 computations per hour that win. This cannot be made more efficient: If computing one hash costs less energy, the difficulty will be adjusted to require more calculations to keep the target of 6 hashes per hour. By the decentralized property of cryptocurrencies, it is by design not possible to regulate where the energy for this lottery is coming from.

CPLX 5y ago

You could book plane tickets. That, literally all by itself, would be enough for me to think building the internet was worth it. You kids have no idea how much fun it was to go downtown to a travel agent just to find out how much it would cost to fly home from college for Christmas.

B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
> go downtown to a travel agent Phones were out, too? ("You kids" should realize that most of the stuff done on the web today was done by mail or phone during most of the XX century, especially in a country as spread out as the US. Ring up the merchant with the order, sing out the credit card, done, was the MO from the 70s to the late 90s.)
- CPLX 5y ago
  I mean, yes. You’d need to go get the paper tickets. Obviously there were variations on how people would do things and mail order existed but I’m speaking literally, that’s how we used to do it and when the internet came along it got way way better.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
    > need to go get the paper tickets. Darn, no mail service either. That's harsh.

mthoms 5y ago

The "early internet" comparison is usually presented when talking about how clumsy and slow the technology is in its current state. The argument is certainly not presented in the context of how "fun" it is. There's nothing "fun" about finance (and there never will be). In the context of technological state (how brittle and obtuse the tools are), the comparison between the two is right on the money IMHO. I once configured SOCKS on Windows 3.1 so I could connect to the internet over a 9600-baud modem. In those days, unless you were in Academia, you didn't know anyone with an email address. Early Usenet and IRC had very little to offer someone who wasn't a nerd. FTP? MUD gaming? Come on. You and I found the early internet interesting precisely because we were nerds to begin with. Don't mistake that sentiment for that of the general public. They mostly found it frustrating and boring.

pavlov 5y ago
Nerds, early adopters — whatever you want to call them, the online behaviors they pioneered became mainstream. In contrast not even nerds are actually using Bitcoin or Ethereum for anything that interacts with the real world. All proposed applications are self-referential shell games like NFTs, staking schemes, etc. If this is a superior platform for finance, where’s the real economic activity? Handwaving about “probably they use it in Venezuela” doesn’t cut it.
- SubiculumCode 5y ago
  There is accelerating adoption of blockchain to manage cargo shipments, bills of laden, and authentication of supply chains.
  - knorker 5y ago
    Also git. Also completely irrelevant for any of the cryptocurrencies and smart contract systems.
- mthoms 5y ago
  I'm going to cease to engage for several reasons: 1) You just flatly contradicted yourself without even realizing it. The top level comment said "The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access.". When challenged, you moved the bar to "Well, it eventually became useful to everyone!". 2) You're condescending "I can see how people in their twenties would fall for this...", "Handwaving", "Shell games". 3) You've got some internal benchmark about what qualifies as useful that appears to mean "if it's not useful to me, then it doesn't count" (see comment about Venezuela). 4) You seem to think of yourself as some kind of gatekeeper or authority on nerddom. I'm not going to change your mind about anything. I've been around the internet long enough to spot people pretending to want genuine engagement when they really despise your ideas and just want to publicly slam dunk on you. Not interested.

titzer 5y ago

> The early Internet was infinite times more fun. Holy crapballs, yeah it was! I remember when I learned HTML in 1996 and put up one of those blinkety animated GIF homepages on the hosting space given (for free!) by my local dial-up ISP. They had a local chatroom and I spent hours and hours chatting with locals from the same city--even met some of them! I read the hacker's manifesto and about phreaking and all of that stuff, found Usenet, played Quake over 33.6kbps dialup with a 300ms ping and still wiped the floor with people. I remember when mp3's came out. It took me 5 mins to download my first one. C&C music factory--everybody dance now! But that's just nostalgia part. The reality is that nowadays the internet is ad-laden crapware/spyware that is scheming every second of every day to get you to do something--sign up for something, buy something, like something, rate something. Your eyeballs, your likes, your hates, your friends, your vices and quirks, are worth billions to multi-national corps who hope to never have to give you customer service, who keep you at AI-defended arms-length, but will happily sell your attention (won through their latest crack-like invention) to the highest bidder. It feels like the internet is infested with the worst of human carnival barkers and con-artists these days.

shiftpgdn 5y ago
The early internet was overrun with this stuff too. Remember Bonzai buddy? Or the ad serving tools that’d claim to pay you for every hour you’re connected to the internet?
- mandelken 5y ago
  Wow, blast from the past! I actually got a check from one of those pay per hour ad services more than 20 years ago, and to this day it's still the only check I've ever received :-) (It was 15 USD so costed almost as much to cash in Europe as it was worth)
- lamontcg 5y ago
  I remember Usenet before Eternal September and before Canter and Siegel, when the backbone was NSFnet and before the National Information Infrastructure Act of 1993. If someone was doing anything commercial over e-mail or usenet you could contact their "sysop" or their upstreams and have them removed.

ahallock 5y ago

> With cryptocurrency there’s nothing to do Then you haven't looked deep enough or maybe the subject matter doesn't interest you. Don't extrapolate your experience to everyone else. I find the DeFi space and the scaling issues and layer 2 projects being built pretty interesting. Web3 and the protocols being built around that are also worth a look. Sure, there are a lot of scams and vaporware, but that's also true of the early and today's internet.

bryanwb 5y ago

Smart contract platforms are only four years old. Only in the last 12 months have we seen significant throughput on public chains like Solana and Avalanche.

bryanwb 5y ago

It is like the early Internet and you are like one of the old telco guys I worked w/ in 2000 who said people would never make phone calls on the Internet.

knorker 5y ago
I sure hope this MLM and tax fraud is not our brave new world. It's not that we don't believe it. It's that it's a dystopia.
- bryanwb 5y ago
  Have you even taken more than a cursory look at Ethereum? I will get off your lawn now.
bryanwb 5y ago
I see I am downvoted by the newest generation of "old telco guys." HN is a retirement home.

fortran77 5y ago

USENET had nothing to do with the Internet. It ran over UUCP.

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ffggvv 5y ago

the problem is there’s always someone knew who hasn’t been fooled by it, and it can sound good at first. i remember i believed in it in 2013 before becoming disillusioned. but there’s people who first bought it in 2020 who tell me i don’t understand ot

EricMausler 5y ago
Smart contracts seem legitimately useful. Am I missing something here?
- doom 5y ago
  They suppose both parties have equal power (money, ability to analyze the smart contract). I doubt most contract negotiations are like that. Signing a smart contract with Google, written by Google engineers, is like signing your own death warrant. You'd have to hire your own E&Y consultants to verify the contract doesn't screw you, and then we're back to the problems of regular contracts. Perhaps useful in 1% of contracts, useless otherwise.
- ffggvv 5y ago
  can you give some examples of them being legitimately useful and advantageous compared to the existing financial infrastructure? haven’t seen anything where it’s actually needed or better. and basically all examples end up with some sort of trust needed at some point. such as gambling on the outcome of a sports game. it would still require a dependency on some sort of Api to provide the sports results and then you’re trusting the api to give uncorrupted correct results… which defeats the purpose of “trustless”
  - EricMausler 5y ago
    You are thinking way too extreme. An API is still a hell of a lot better than a sketchy bookie. I would trust the former and not the latter. Which helps break up the centralization of betting because it is much easier to establish trust in a 3rd party source of truth than it is to establish trust in someone being financially responsible / honorable. Will it improve the established market providers for sports betting? No. But that's the point. It enables people to make a small business betting shop

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ThomPete 5y ago

its not about interesting but about adoption. Crypto is interesting to anyone who spend time getting into it. Not for the same reasons and that is why the adoption looks different, but its there and that is really what matters.

Beaver117 5y ago

I maintain that the most useful feature of crypto is still crime. The Silk Road was the killer app.

baby 5y ago
Wasn’t the first use of internet to buy weed between two universities? Edit: first thing bought on the internet apparently was weed https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-was-first-thing-sold-internet-180957414/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-was-first-thi...

K0balt 5y ago

Hmm. It’s interesting to note that skeptics seem much more invested in being right about crypto being a scam than proponents are in it being here to stay. The more time passes, the shriller the cries of skeptics become, leading me to believe that skeptics are emotionally invested to the extreme in the failure of crypto. I rarely see any carefully considered, informed opinions just tulips and drugs and money laundering lol. You know what is used for drugs? Cash. You know how money is laundered? Banks. You know what is worthless? Venezuelan currency. Sure, crypto, just like any fungible asset, is used in these ways... but none nearly as much a fiat is. I’m becoming convinced that naysayers are more and more afraid of having been wrong and missing the boat as time goes on. Every day Bitcoin fails to go to 0, it gains legitimacy as a store of value and means of payment. I guess that is pretty nerve wracking if you made a hasty decision early on to pretend it wasn’t happening, and now it seems like you’re being left in the dust, still preaching from your soap box. It’s been more than a decade. It’s here to stay. It will get better, but it’s not going anywhere.

tyre 5y ago
> Every day Bitcoin fails to go to 0, it gains legitimacy as a store of value and means of payment. Bitcoin is a horrible store of value. It might not go to zero, but it’s fluctuates wildly. I think for people who predicted from a decade ago that this was all nonsense, the case is there that it is. Realistically, what are we looking at? What runs on smart contracts? What is being bought and sold with Bitcoin. This answer is not nothing, but…I mean really? This is the revolution? As far as legal uses, the only one that has any amount of traffic is speculation. That’s it. Are there other people using it occasionally for other things? Sure! But then we’re looking at, checks ledger NFTs? All of this while burning through tremendous amounts of electricity. We’re talking over half a percent of the total energy consumption of human civilization. What have we gotten in return? This isn’t like people pushing back against airplanes or paper or rice. There’s no denying that a lot of money is thrown around, but you can only talk about people being “left in the dust” if you can point to something worth, again, >0.5% of electricity consumption of the PLANET.
roca 5y ago
Every time a Musk tweet swings the value of BTC by 20% --- in either direction --- Bitcoin loses credibility as a store of value. "Price greater than zero" is not enough to make something a good store of value. BTC as a means of payment is a joke. Most Bitcoin fans I engage with have actually given up on that. In fact, the scaling limitations of Bitcoin transactions are now touted as a good thing because that bounds the eventual energy usage of the network. The Bitcoin cult is strong enough that I have no doubt Bitcoin is here to stay. It's sad, but it doesn't bother me. On the other hand it's obvious why Bitcoin HODLers have a deep financial interest in crypto being "here to stay".

strangescript 5y ago

I mean it took a decade for that internet you are describing to form in the 90s from its inception in the 80s. Even then, only a small fraction of people were participating. BC has value because it a limited supply of a unique item that can be mathematically verified, even if it never solves all problems its advocates claim to want to solve in the world. It might not have value to you personally, but it currently does to some people. Just like you might not value Micheal Jordan's rookie card, it is after all a supposedly limited supply piece of printed thin cardboard, there are plenty of people that do. Let's pretend crypto currency tech didn't exist. Your local gov't wants to develop a digital currency that is verifiable, devoid of simple fraud and counterfeit, and is completely traceable by the general public. All the smart people in the country would get to together and would come up with system that would end up looking a lot like block chain. The gov't would control all the nodes of course. They would contract out server maintenance (mining), charge fees on transactions (sales tax) and banks would hold your digital currency and give you interest (staking). Instead of stocks, companies would probably just issue, I dunno, something uniquely tied to them that equates to value, like a ... token? It's not much different from what we do now, it just doesn't involve a bunch of baggage paper money has been carrying around for hundreds of years.

doom 5y ago
Would the government mandate an inane proof of work scheme so that the energy usage goes up YoY every year?

ajkdhcb2 5y ago

Darknet markets haven't been fascinating since 2012?

Keeeeeeeks 5y ago

selection bias is so strong, that even if I walked you through exceptions to the things you don't like, you'd still fixate on those undesirable things, as if to say that the good-faith actors should stop acting in good faith and spend their time wagging their fingers at the things you don't like. But complaining about something without taking the underlying behaviors in good faith and synthesizing alternatives doesn't really offer much for the people who are looking for the good things. That's why you won't get many good faith actors interacting with this, because it's better for them (and implicitly, the negation of your premise that it's all scams) for them to negate your arg by building more and more new things with crypto.

nealabq 5y ago

I was instantly hooked on Usenet when I got access in 1982. It was sometimes useful and always interesting. I had to be careful to limit my time reading it so I could get my work done. It felt futuristic, here to stay. Bitcoin feels like a great experiment and proof of concept. And someday a useful cryptocurrency may arise from the lessons learnt. But it won't be Bitcoin.

dwild 5y ago

> The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access. That's quite an absurd statement to make. I can easily find people right now that find no interest in the current internet, it's literally impossible that in the past it would have been different with way less interesting things to do on it.. There's a huge bias in what you state. I have no doubt that plenty of people who got access at the time found it interesting, but the thing you ignore is that theses are the one that found it interesting that got access in the first place. Like sure email are incredibly useful, but to send to who? It's is right now that I can send them to 2 billions users, but in 1996, that was 16 millions... kind of much less useful, the chances are most people you knew, didn't knew anyone that was on it at the time... thus literally useless. FTP are nice, but plenty didn't used computers at all, sharing files meant nothing. I know so many right now that have trouble sharing files, yet FTP still exist... no chance they would have shared any in the past. You are now on that team, the ones that don't have any use for it right now. It's fine that you don't find it interesting, but please don't be that old grandpa that scream "get out of my lawn" please... > The early Internet was infinite times more fun. Curiously, I've seen tons of people having fun with cryptocurrencies, in different ways, you are just not part of it...

baby 5y ago

What are your arguments though? I see no clear argument in this thread besides “bitcoin is bad” which makes it look like most people here haven’t investigated past bitcoin.

nostrademons 5y ago

If you date the Internet from development of ARPANET in 1969, it really wasn't useful for 13 years after its development. For one, the general public couldn't get on it. Two, the early Internet basically consisted of running a packet-switched network on top of the existing circuit-switched phone network, at drastically reduced efficiency. That was the only other network that existed, after all. Three, DNS didn't exist until 1983, 14 years after ARPANET and 10 years after TCP/IP. Four, the protocols you mention also didn't exist until the 1980s, ~15 years after the technology was developed. I too got on the Internet in the early 1990s with e-mail, FTP, Usenet, and MUDs. I'm not actually an early Internet user. That'd be folks like my friend's dad, who worked at BBN in the 1970s, or the folks at Symbolics, who registered the first domain name in 1985.

tetherino 5y ago
Official start of internet is 1983.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

The comparison to Scientology seems apt in one sense. The CoS is known for silencing any unscripted commentary on the CoS that CoS does not control. They keep very aggressive legal counsel on retainer specifically for this purpose. Similarly, "crypto" seems to have a team of advocates present 24/7 online who actively try to suppress or counter any negative discussion of "crypto". It is like a Yahoo chat room devotd to the stock of some company. The company has a compelling interest to squelch that chat room. People donate to CoS as well as "invest" in crypto; this practice has tangible benefit to the recpients of the funds. These beneficiaries do not want the benefit to end. They wnat it to grow. The suppression of "negative" commentary about crypto online is frightening to watch because it honestly seems to work. It is some sort of community-based censorship.

sanderjd 5y ago

I definitely agree with the thrust of your point, but there was actually a period of time where none of the fun stuff you listed existed. Email and ftp had to be invented and implemented awhile after the internet was created. There was a period where there was nothing to do on the internet, it just predates most of us. But it was definitely a much shorter period and the killer apps were way more obvious even before they were created. It's still not clear, after all this time, what the killer apps even might be for crypto; it definitely isn't all the echo chamber speculation stuff that is all you can do now ("lend your crypto to other crypto speculators who can't do anything with it besides lending it to yet other speculators!"). Personally, I would like to be able to (legally!) program against my money and do stuff with it without being beholden to big banks. I think it would be cool if I could automatically send 1% or whatever of all my transactions to a charity of my choice, or if I could do my own "micro-finance" lending to farmers in developing countries, or other things like that which currently require a bank to implement it and me to use whatever they implement. But it is far from clear whether all this cryptocurrency and DeFi stuff is either necessary or sufficient to do any of this kind of stuff.

TimJRobinson 5y ago

I see you haven't gone down the decentralized finance rabbit hole yet. It's the most fun I've had learning and playing around with in a decade. It's a lot like early web dev but with money.

Siira 5y ago

Well, it's not like the governments have allowed crypto to work. Telegram's plans were forcibly halted, technically superior coins like Monero are banned from exchanges, and the elites (who ultimately benefit from the hegemony of the current fictional currencies) are continuously propagandizing against proof of work. Give it space first, then complain why it doesn't work.

alexyim 5y ago

I'm surprised to see this so heavily upvoted here on HN. I'd argue you just haven't explored enough around its possibilities. I just read this today. https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/1400459822080819204 https://twitter.com/mcuban/status/1400459822080819204 I think we're just beginning to get to the good stuff.