3 ms·

>“Maybe five years from now or 10 years from now or 20 years from now something useful will emerge from this, but so far, all that’s emerging is burning garbage

>“Maybe five years from now or 10 years from now or 20 years from now something useful will emerge from this, but so far, all that’s emerging is burning garbage,” Kashkari said. I would love to hear Vitalik Buterins take on this. After listening to him for a while, I got very humble with respect to the ideas of crypto, the abstraction of value etc. - of course the world of crypto is dominated by pump and dumps at the moment, but I'm not convinced that that's all there is to see. I think that crypto will reshape the world of money, just not in the terms that money is being thought off right now. If that assumption holds, most people would be unable to see the forest for the trees.

beambot 5y ago
> If that assumption holds, most people would be unable to see the forest for the trees, maybe even the president of the fed of minneapolis. It reminds me of living through the early www. We went from "who would ever buy books online?!", to DotCom euphoria, to market crash, to a long-term recovery, to a thriving internet economy. Some of the largest companies on the planet were created during the initial heyday period. Their trajectory was very non-linear, but they've had tremendous impact.
- echelon 5y ago
  WWW: April 30, 1993 (28 years, 2 months) Bitcoin: January, 2009 (12 years, 5 months) In two more years, we'll be just about halfway there. I think the internet had far more apparent uses at 12 years (2005) than bitcoin has now.
  - beambot 5y ago
    Time constants on innovation rarely translate across domains. Look at adoption times for bank notes to central bank (i.e. federally-backed) fiat. Or adoption and discontinuation of the gold standard. TLDR: I would expect the time constant for money to be longer than the www.
  - WalterSear 5y ago
    The internet is far older than the WWW, fwiw. The first online commercial transaction was performed in 1971. https://www.fastcompany.com/3054025/youll-never-guess-what-the-first-thing-ever-sold-on-the-internet-was https://www.fastcompany.com/3054025/youll-never-guess-what-t...
- mdoms 5y ago
  The usefulness of the web was immediately apparent to a certain group of people, even if it was poo-pooed by the mainstream. The difference is that even crypto evangelists who are deeply immersed and invested in it will openly tell you that no, bitcoin is not a useful currency and we never expect it to be (and some will tell you it was never intended to be).
  - beambot 5y ago
    You're conflating bitcoin (specifically) with blockchain (generally). The general class of networked computers spawned a bunch of specific implementations: www, usenet, gopher, etc. Some survived, others didn't. The ones that survived are incredibly valuable. One example: A ground-truth ledger with decentralized trust & transparency has a great many use cases. Each of these is a rabbit hole of antiquity... but a few good examples are digital voting (see recent US elections), realestate transactions (see land registry & title hell) and stock transactions (DTC is absurd; need only look to RegSHO).

beambot 5y ago

> If that assumption holds, most people would be unable to see the forest for the trees, maybe even the president of the fed of minneapolis. It reminds me of living through the early www. We went from "who would ever buy books online?!", to DotCom euphoria, to market crash, to a long-term recovery, to a thriving internet economy. Some of the largest companies on the planet were created during the initial heyday period. Their trajectory was very non-linear, but they've had tremendous impact.

echelon 5y ago
WWW: April 30, 1993 (28 years, 2 months) Bitcoin: January, 2009 (12 years, 5 months) In two more years, we'll be just about halfway there. I think the internet had far more apparent uses at 12 years (2005) than bitcoin has now.
- beambot 5y ago
  Time constants on innovation rarely translate across domains. Look at adoption times for bank notes to central bank (i.e. federally-backed) fiat. Or adoption and discontinuation of the gold standard. TLDR: I would expect the time constant for money to be longer than the www.
- WalterSear 5y ago
  The internet is far older than the WWW, fwiw. The first online commercial transaction was performed in 1971. https://www.fastcompany.com/3054025/youll-never-guess-what-the-first-thing-ever-sold-on-the-internet-was https://www.fastcompany.com/3054025/youll-never-guess-what-t...
mdoms 5y ago
The usefulness of the web was immediately apparent to a certain group of people, even if it was poo-pooed by the mainstream. The difference is that even crypto evangelists who are deeply immersed and invested in it will openly tell you that no, bitcoin is not a useful currency and we never expect it to be (and some will tell you it was never intended to be).
- beambot 5y ago
  You're conflating bitcoin (specifically) with blockchain (generally). The general class of networked computers spawned a bunch of specific implementations: www, usenet, gopher, etc. Some survived, others didn't. The ones that survived are incredibly valuable. One example: A ground-truth ledger with decentralized trust & transparency has a great many use cases. Each of these is a rabbit hole of antiquity... but a few good examples are digital voting (see recent US elections), realestate transactions (see land registry & title hell) and stock transactions (DTC is absurd; need only look to RegSHO).