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Great write up! Added to my list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30133374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30133374 Agree with your assessment t

Great write up! Added to my list here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30133374 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30133374 Agree with your assessment that 100 million is an upper bound. I am curious about a deeper analysis as well that involves defining what "real users" are and then seeing how many transactions/wallets meet that criteria. i.e. of that "100 million", how many of them are simply buying and hodling? How many have done a non-exchange transaction (i.e. bought a thing, not coins. Buying NFTs counts! Or a pizza, or buying software, or staking or something) The comparison to Diner's club is also relevant. 20 years from zero to 51% of all Americans. Just getting to your "Why has blockchain user adoption been so terrible and what can we do about it?" section and will edit after that. Edit: Well worth the read. If anything, the title and top image were a bit clickbaity, but the article itself was great, all the way through to the end. Overall, the key question you point to is "Why did the web grow 10x faster than blockchain? Facebook 15x, and mobile 35x faster?" I'm curious about this! Is there a recent technology that did grow at 10x over 13 years that we could learn from? Another way to look at this is blockchain is growing at 23% YOY over the last 13 years. What technologies should we compare it to? Just to pull on the thread, is blockchain more like "hard tech"? If so, that would be really odd since it's not "hard tech". What has EV growth been like? Here's a chart [1] from [2] that says about 17 million EVs have been sold since 2012. Let's call that 13 years for the sake of keeping the math the same, but the web grew 100x as fast. OK so cryptocurrency is growing about order of magnitude faster than EVs, but why is it slower than the web? What else develops at a speed that's 10x faster than the growth of EVs, but still slower than the web itself? [1] https://www.ev-volumes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/WW-K-6-2021.png https://www.ev-volumes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/WW-K-6... [2]

kkielhofner 5y ago
I'm actually working on a tool to use data from the Glassnode API to possibly answer some of the questions. I'll be pushing it to Github at some point in the near future. What's interesting about public blockchain data (from a node directly or something like Glassnode) is that the transaction data is so readily available. We can easily analyze transactions and unique addresses. Therefore transaction rates and volumes, long with unique to/from addresses, allow for ready analysis of adoption across the entire chain. For example, Polygon has relatively low trade volume but is very popular for smart contracts (applications). Because of this the ATH high daily transaction count is roughly 9x Ethereum even though Ethereum is considered to be more "popular". I don't have any better or more valid comparisons for blockchain than what I've presented in that rant. Certainly open to any suggestions. That said, I think there's probably a valid internet law that can be derived stating something like "A new technology paradigm either reaches 1 billion users inside of 13 years or becomes irrelevant" (with the web setting the benchmark at 1B in 13 yr). Appreciate the feedback on image and title. Perhaps a little clickbaity but I feel the premise is original and I establish some bonafides immediately. The web and mobile were absolutely hard tech. The majority of web users went from dialup ISPs to cable, DSL, etc. Many thousands of truck rolls, ditches dug, submarine cables laid, increasingly scalable servers, the C10k problem[1], fiber optical cabling and optical switching innovation, etc. The list is almost endless. Mobile - remember upon the exclusive release of the iPhone on AT&T and the network practically collapsed in major cities[2]? The success of mobile depended on massive build out of additional cellular infrastructure, back hauls, new spectrum auctions, the sun-setting of analog TV broadcasts, etc. Look at the standards (and component standards) for 2G-5G. I'd say that alone makes it hard tech. EVs are a really hard (potentially invalid) comparison if for no other reason than the average car on the road in the US is 12.1 years old[3]. I don't know how I would start looking at EV adoption for comparison with that thrown in the mix. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/technology/companies/03att.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/technology/companies/03at... [3] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/28/cars-on-american-roads-keep-getting-older.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/28/cars-on-american-roads-keep-...
- magicjosh 5y ago
  Cool! You've probably already seen it but Dune Analytics has some useful blockchain data analysis tools too. I hadn't heard of Glassnode before. Edit: thinking of other technology adoption curves. Faster than EVs but slower than web and mobile. Thinking of finance too. What's the adoption of NFCs/touchless payments/chips look like? What about the rise of microlending/lending club etc?
  - kkielhofner 5y ago
    Looking at other technology adoption curves is interesting and difficult. Bitcoin (the "digital cash" vision) was released in 2009. It didn't register on Google Trends until 2011. This already isn't a good sign. Ethereum came along in 2015 and introduced the concept of the Ethereum Virtual Machine and smart contracts. Now "blockchain" is a bona fide platform where people can leverage Ethereum and the underlying blockchain network to build things. Another question - why did it take six years for blockchain technology to progress from digital cash to platform? Now seven years after that even when combining digital cash (payments), "store of value"/gambling (trading, speculation), and all things smart contract (NFTs, DAO, ENS, microlending, etc) there are still at best 100 million total users for all of these use cases combined.

kkielhofner 5y ago

I'm actually working on a tool to use data from the Glassnode API to possibly answer some of the questions. I'll be pushing it to Github at some point in the near future. What's interesting about public blockchain data (from a node directly or something like Glassnode) is that the transaction data is so readily available. We can easily analyze transactions and unique addresses. Therefore transaction rates and volumes, long with unique to/from addresses, allow for ready analysis of adoption across the entire chain. For example, Polygon has relatively low trade volume but is very popular for smart contracts (applications). Because of this the ATH high daily transaction count is roughly 9x Ethereum even though Ethereum is considered to be more "popular". I don't have any better or more valid comparisons for blockchain than what I've presented in that rant. Certainly open to any suggestions. That said, I think there's probably a valid internet law that can be derived stating something like "A new technology paradigm either reaches 1 billion users inside of 13 years or becomes irrelevant" (with the web setting the benchmark at 1B in 13 yr). Appreciate the feedback on image and title. Perhaps a little clickbaity but I feel the premise is original and I establish some bonafides immediately. The web and mobile were absolutely hard tech. The majority of web users went from dialup ISPs to cable, DSL, etc. Many thousands of truck rolls, ditches dug, submarine cables laid, increasingly scalable servers, the C10k problem[1], fiber optical cabling and optical switching innovation, etc. The list is almost endless. Mobile - remember upon the exclusive release of the iPhone on AT&T and the network practically collapsed in major cities[2]? The success of mobile depended on massive build out of additional cellular infrastructure, back hauls, new spectrum auctions, the sun-setting of analog TV broadcasts, etc. Look at the standards (and component standards) for 2G-5G. I'd say that alone makes it hard tech. EVs are a really hard (potentially invalid) comparison if for no other reason than the average car on the road in the US is 12.1 years old[3]. I don't know how I would start looking at EV adoption for comparison with that thrown in the mix. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/technology/companies/03att.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/technology/companies/03at... [3] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/28/cars-on-american-roads-keep-getting-older.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/28/cars-on-american-roads-keep-...

magicjosh 5y ago
Cool! You've probably already seen it but Dune Analytics has some useful blockchain data analysis tools too. I hadn't heard of Glassnode before. Edit: thinking of other technology adoption curves. Faster than EVs but slower than web and mobile. Thinking of finance too. What's the adoption of NFCs/touchless payments/chips look like? What about the rise of microlending/lending club etc?
- kkielhofner 5y ago
  Looking at other technology adoption curves is interesting and difficult. Bitcoin (the "digital cash" vision) was released in 2009. It didn't register on Google Trends until 2011. This already isn't a good sign. Ethereum came along in 2015 and introduced the concept of the Ethereum Virtual Machine and smart contracts. Now "blockchain" is a bona fide platform where people can leverage Ethereum and the underlying blockchain network to build things. Another question - why did it take six years for blockchain technology to progress from digital cash to platform? Now seven years after that even when combining digital cash (payments), "store of value"/gambling (trading, speculation), and all things smart contract (NFTs, DAO, ENS, microlending, etc) there are still at best 100 million total users for all of these use cases combined.