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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 no

by 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.
  - knorker 5y ago
    That's clearly not what they said. Any of the points. Except condescending. But I can't blame them with the nonsense you're saying.
    - mthoms 5y ago
      Tell me then, why does usage in Venezuela (and other countries) as a hedge against hyperinflation not count as real-world positive usage? You can also tell me, as a nerd who has lived through both eras, why my experience doesn't count?
      - skinnymuch 5y ago
        Your experience does count. Your anger and seeming intent on winning the arguments no matter what could be tainting or tilting your positioning of your experiences as worse than they were.
  - pavlov 5y ago
    I don’t know what you mean by point 1. The qualifier I used was “everyone who got access”, and I stand by that. Initially only nerds had access and they couldn’t get enough. When access expanded to the general public, they couldn’t get enough either. “You’ve Got Mail” is a 1998 movie starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The internet was completely mainstream just 16 years after the military decided to standardize on IPv4. If there will be a 2024 Hollywood blockbuster called “You’ve Got Bitcoin”, it’s going to be a dark parody of speculation and greed, not a heartwarming tale of how much cryptocurrency helped average people connect with each other.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- floatboth 5y ago
  > where’s the real economic activity? If all the speculative activity isn't real enough, how about the ransoms being paid to ransomware authors?
- lhl 5y ago
  To answer your last question first, crypto clearly is a superior platform for finance, exactly because of the explosion in "self-referential shell games" - it's in fact an extreme democratizer of "finance" - anyone can create their own liquidity pools, it's trivial to create not just CDOs, but CDO2s, 3s 4s, and they all run 24/7 forever. (no, this does not have much relevance to "real" economic activity, but this is true of almost all financialization and the more people that people understand that the better, IMO) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_economy Now for some of the more useful/interesting stuff I've seen: Gitcoin has been pioneering Quadratic Funding for open source projects for some time now: https://github.com/gitcoinco/quadratic-funding https://github.com/gitcoinco/quadratic-funding They recent launched a governance token and DAO (many other projects have been experimenting with various types of on-chain governance models). Both of these pursuits are widely applicable for creating sustainable models for funding and managing distributed common good projects. Brave has over 25M active users and has built a model on their token to pay website users and creators for ads, as well as allow in-browser tipping, etc. Many DeFi projects are experimenting with various novel forms of tokenomics (hold X tokens to access Y features; yield earned w/ Z tokens accrue to the developers) which are interesting alternatives for creating sustainable development/operational models for software. There are projects that are doing interesting work bridging digital and physical assets (particularly in harmonizing the legal mechanisms for property) like Mattereum, but I'd argue even the simplest types of digital-only tokenization become interesting when it can be made composable with other dapps (eg, fractional ownership of projects that can later be made liquid on the open market or that can be collateralized). This ties back to the domain of not just coordinating, but incentivizing distributed collaboration/human resources.
  - doom 5y ago
    Can you explain why I need a crypto(tm) Gitcoin and not just a cyber chuck e cheese token? I give cyber-chuck $1 and he gives me 1 cyber token. I can subdivide it 10,000 times and micro-tip any site I want. Why do I need cryptocurrency? If your argument is that crypto would decentralize it, and guarantee a cap on coin totals, I don't buy it. That's not the reason a site owner wouldn't join a coin plan. "I would love to get paid, but I hate inflation too much to consider your proposal". Fantasy land.
knorker 5y ago
No, it's not a good comparison. The internet was always state of the art and better at solving actual problems the worse solutions were tackling. Fidonet was always, on a technical level, a worse experience than the internet. BBSs have their charm, but were absolutely obviously worse at what they did that the internet. Cryptocurrencies are just awful at solving real problems, compared to existing solutions. Why are you talking about the general public? Are you equating "well the internet was only cool to nerds, solving their needs" with "Bitcoin is only good for its MLM speculation properties, and to buy drugs and murders"? "Unless you were in academia"... So you admit that it WAS useful? And how it WAS much better than what it replaced? Because that's the opposite of Bitcoin.
- mthoms 5y ago
  It's a good comparison insofar as the tools were/are primitive and only usable by experts. A lot of domain knowledge was required. You can hate crypto and still agree with me on the above point. It's a pretty innocuous observation. I'm not going to engage the rest of your argument which has no bearing on the point being made.
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    Yeah! My brother was an expert in 1990 at 6. Me at 6 in 93-94. Except we most certainly weren’t. You’re giving a completely wrong impression of how the early web was and the early internet. I wasn’t around for that so I won’t personally give my input but for the time, each iteration every few years was great. If domain knowledge wasn’t needed by the 90s. When was serious domain knowledge needed? When did that stop? Some people found the internet hard to use and found it required more domain knowledge than they had every single year since the internet snd web have been around. Including in the 2020s.
    - knorker 5y ago
      I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Comparing cryptocurrencies to the Internet is about comparing its usefulness, not it's understandability. I won't argue that people in general understood the Internet. Take my example of Fidonet. If you were not a computer expert then you had never heard of Fidonet. BBSs? Maybe you'd heard of it in some news clip about the dangers of computers. Hell, the only time non-experts even saw anything close to a BBS was probably the movie Wargames. > You’re giving a completely wrong impression of how the early web was and the early internet. In what way? > I wasn’t around for that so I won’t personally give my input You don't know, but you know I'm wrong about it?
skinnymuch 5y ago
You can go a bit later and talk Windows 95 time. The internet was a live enough by the mid 90s. If that’s not early enough then the argument is just silly.

by mthoms 5y ago

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.
- knorker 5y ago
  That's clearly not what they said. Any of the points. Except condescending. But I can't blame them with the nonsense you're saying.
  - mthoms 5y ago
    Tell me then, why does usage in Venezuela (and other countries) as a hedge against hyperinflation not count as real-world positive usage? You can also tell me, as a nerd who has lived through both eras, why my experience doesn't count?
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      Your experience does count. Your anger and seeming intent on winning the arguments no matter what could be tainting or tilting your positioning of your experiences as worse than they were.
- pavlov 5y ago
  I don’t know what you mean by point 1. The qualifier I used was “everyone who got access”, and I stand by that. Initially only nerds had access and they couldn’t get enough. When access expanded to the general public, they couldn’t get enough either. “You’ve Got Mail” is a 1998 movie starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The internet was completely mainstream just 16 years after the military decided to standardize on IPv4. If there will be a 2024 Hollywood blockbuster called “You’ve Got Bitcoin”, it’s going to be a dark parody of speculation and greed, not a heartwarming tale of how much cryptocurrency helped average people connect with each other.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
floatboth 5y ago
> where’s the real economic activity? If all the speculative activity isn't real enough, how about the ransoms being paid to ransomware authors?
lhl 5y ago
To answer your last question first, crypto clearly is a superior platform for finance, exactly because of the explosion in "self-referential shell games" - it's in fact an extreme democratizer of "finance" - anyone can create their own liquidity pools, it's trivial to create not just CDOs, but CDO2s, 3s 4s, and they all run 24/7 forever. (no, this does not have much relevance to "real" economic activity, but this is true of almost all financialization and the more people that people understand that the better, IMO) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_economy Now for some of the more useful/interesting stuff I've seen: Gitcoin has been pioneering Quadratic Funding for open source projects for some time now: https://github.com/gitcoinco/quadratic-funding https://github.com/gitcoinco/quadratic-funding They recent launched a governance token and DAO (many other projects have been experimenting with various types of on-chain governance models). Both of these pursuits are widely applicable for creating sustainable models for funding and managing distributed common good projects. Brave has over 25M active users and has built a model on their token to pay website users and creators for ads, as well as allow in-browser tipping, etc. Many DeFi projects are experimenting with various novel forms of tokenomics (hold X tokens to access Y features; yield earned w/ Z tokens accrue to the developers) which are interesting alternatives for creating sustainable development/operational models for software. There are projects that are doing interesting work bridging digital and physical assets (particularly in harmonizing the legal mechanisms for property) like Mattereum, but I'd argue even the simplest types of digital-only tokenization become interesting when it can be made composable with other dapps (eg, fractional ownership of projects that can later be made liquid on the open market or that can be collateralized). This ties back to the domain of not just coordinating, but incentivizing distributed collaboration/human resources.
- doom 5y ago
  Can you explain why I need a crypto(tm) Gitcoin and not just a cyber chuck e cheese token? I give cyber-chuck $1 and he gives me 1 cyber token. I can subdivide it 10,000 times and micro-tip any site I want. Why do I need cryptocurrency? If your argument is that crypto would decentralize it, and guarantee a cap on coin totals, I don't buy it. That's not the reason a site owner wouldn't join a coin plan. "I would love to get paid, but I hate inflation too much to consider your proposal". Fantasy land.

knorker 5y ago

No, it's not a good comparison. The internet was always state of the art and better at solving actual problems the worse solutions were tackling. Fidonet was always, on a technical level, a worse experience than the internet. BBSs have their charm, but were absolutely obviously worse at what they did that the internet. Cryptocurrencies are just awful at solving real problems, compared to existing solutions. Why are you talking about the general public? Are you equating "well the internet was only cool to nerds, solving their needs" with "Bitcoin is only good for its MLM speculation properties, and to buy drugs and murders"? "Unless you were in academia"... So you admit that it WAS useful? And how it WAS much better than what it replaced? Because that's the opposite of Bitcoin.

mthoms 5y ago
It's a good comparison insofar as the tools were/are primitive and only usable by experts. A lot of domain knowledge was required. You can hate crypto and still agree with me on the above point. It's a pretty innocuous observation. I'm not going to engage the rest of your argument which has no bearing on the point being made.
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  Yeah! My brother was an expert in 1990 at 6. Me at 6 in 93-94. Except we most certainly weren’t. You’re giving a completely wrong impression of how the early web was and the early internet. I wasn’t around for that so I won’t personally give my input but for the time, each iteration every few years was great. If domain knowledge wasn’t needed by the 90s. When was serious domain knowledge needed? When did that stop? Some people found the internet hard to use and found it required more domain knowledge than they had every single year since the internet snd web have been around. Including in the 2020s.
  - knorker 5y ago
    I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Comparing cryptocurrencies to the Internet is about comparing its usefulness, not it's understandability. I won't argue that people in general understood the Internet. Take my example of Fidonet. If you were not a computer expert then you had never heard of Fidonet. BBSs? Maybe you'd heard of it in some news clip about the dangers of computers. Hell, the only time non-experts even saw anything close to a BBS was probably the movie Wargames. > You’re giving a completely wrong impression of how the early web was and the early internet. In what way? > I wasn’t around for that so I won’t personally give my input You don't know, but you know I'm wrong about it?

skinnymuch 5y ago

You can go a bit later and talk Windows 95 time. The internet was a live enough by the mid 90s. If that’s not early enough then the argument is just silly.