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> I think if it survives, the crypto community is in for a reckoning much like 2000. You very well may be right. But the most memorable headline for me from t

> I think if it survives, the crypto community is in for a reckoning much like 2000. You very well may be right. But the most memorable headline for me from that era is this Barron's article: https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1447403828505088011 https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1447403828505088011 If Bitcoin is the equivalent of Yahoo, what are the equivalents of Amazon and Google? People love to use Pets.com as a symbol of excess for that era, but it might not be a great example to use to make that point. At its highest point, Pets.com had a valuation of approximately $300 million (of which ~30% was owned by Amazon). Compare that to the ~$3 billion that PetSmart paid for Chewey.com five years ago, and Chewy.com's current market cap of $12 billion (down ~75% from its high). It's a bit ironic that the pets.com domain redirects to petsmart.com, given that the PetSmart LBO eight years ago, and its acquisition of Chewy five years ago, and the Chewy IPO three years ago—PetSmart sold a minority interest Chewy to protect it from PetSmart's creditors and to pay down debt—were all motivated in large part by the fact that online retail has massively supplanted in-person retail throughout the economy. Was Pets.com overvalued? Or did it just run out of runway before it could displace the incumbents? Is Crypto going to zero? Or is it simply that new technologies take time to find their footing?

syllablehq 4y ago
Exactly: Ignore the crap, and look for the Amazons and Googles. There is so much garbage, but then there are projects like Avalanche. People love to hate on crypto and the stupid puppy coins, but meanwhile, projects like Avalanche are actually running the efficient, performant networks that everyone is shouting will never exist. It takes years to ignore fud and hype and quietly follow the fundamentals.
- t_mann 4y ago
  Avalanche is probably the biggest disappointment out of the whole bunch. They started out strong with a new consensus algorithm, and then they started hyping 'subnets', which turned out to be plain L1s with artificial restrictions on who can be a validator. Their tokenomics are so skewed in favour of AvaLabs and their early VC backers that they removed the pie chart from their website to conceal it. It's probably the most centralized out of all the wannabe Ethereums, with Emin singlehandedly calling the shots (how much needs to be staked to be a validator, whether subnet validators need to be whitelisted...), and they don't seem to have much of an idea where they're going (they went from bashing L2s and saying subnets are so much better to saying 'let's build L2s, ours will be so much better than Ethereum's'; they still haven't managed to build a bridging solution between subnets and they seem to have given up on that, given that they don't seem capable of competing with the existing interoperability protocols that treat subnets like any other chain, Avalanche-related or not). They also lost an 8-figure sum from the Terra collapse (Emin himself promoted UST after the depeg had started), which does not bode well for an ecosystem where they are still the only truly active entity promoting new projects. They're more than ripe for replacement by a standalone EVM-compatible chain that takes the only thing that's genuinely innovative about Avalanche, the consensus algorithms, and leaves the rest to the community (ie an actually decentralized project).
- NetOpWibby 4y ago
  I feel this with Handshake as well.
- pavlov 4y ago
  What are the must-use applications on Avalanche? When I first paid for dial-up Internet in 1993, it was pre-web, just clunky text-mode telnet, but the apps were obviously attractive: IRC, email, Usenet, ftp. Talk to anyone in the world, download latest stuff for free! Same with www a few years later. The dot-com business schemes may have been harebrained but the underlying protocol’s usage was growing exponentially because people couldn’t get enough of the things you could find on the web. What’s the thing on Avalanche that would keep me coming back every day, like dial-up Internet and web did?
  - ertian 4y ago
    I suspect we're not really at the equivalent of 1993. We may still be back in the early 80s, with people exchanging bang paths and oohing and ahhing when an email goes through. 'Real' applications are thin on the ground, largely driven by novelty, and not particularly visible to the public. In most cases, wide-area networks can't compete with a phone call or a station wagon full of floppy disks. There's a bunch of competing approaches; it's not clear which will win, and surely most will fail, but all have devoted adherents. The important standards and protocols may still be in the future, or are obscured by piles of false leads, mistakes, and outright scams. The thing is, we now exist in a post-internet environment where people are well aware of the transformative ability of technology. They're all looking for the Next Big Thing in a way that people just weren't in the 70s and 80s. The population of the world has doubled, and the share of those people who are trying to keep up with the cutting edge is _vastly_ higher. On top of that we're talking about a network of value, i.e. money, and so there's inherently money to be made--and it's accessible to the average Joe. All together, you've got the recipe for a blizzard of hype and excitement that obscures the real innovations that underlie it all. And that's unavoidable. Any exciting new technology with the potential to have a serious impact on society is inevitably going to trigger a blizzard of hype--and an equivalent blizzard of skepticism. That makes the whole process exhausting. Par for the course in 2022.
    - pavlov 4y ago
      A lot of 1980s hype technologies fizzled out. Take CD-ROM, which enjoyed crypto-level multi-year hype before anyone even had a player. None of the companies that invested heavily in CD-ROM were winners. We’re not enjoying our multimedia entertainment on platforms provided by Philips and Sega and Sierra On-Line. There were no Googles or Amazons arising from that massive tech hype cycle. In twenty years, the notion of “I’ll store value using my cryptocurrency wallet” may sound as anachronistic and outdated as “I’ll enjoy a night home browsing hot multimedia content on a Philips CDi disc.”
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Today I read this article https://tweakers.net/geek/196920/terug-in-de-tijd-9-dot-combubble-msn-crazybytes-en-byebye-dynabyte.html https://tweakers.net/geek/196920/terug-in-de-tijd-9-dot-comb... WorldCom was a company that was going to buy Sprint for 129 billion dollars. A few years later it was struck from the corporate history books. In capitalism things can just evaporate.
highwaylights 4y ago
Who are the equivalents of Amazon and Google? Amazon and Google. This has been my biggest issue with cultocurrency since it’s inception. The market cap of the whole lot is made up of maybe 0.04% innovative signing and 99.96% magic beans. Useful use cases of the smidge of innovation can be exploited by the megacaps to extract whatever actual value there is - this current cesspit of Ponzi schemes will not be required.
- ricw 4y ago
  That argument was used in the early internet stages too, and hasn’t aged well. Where are printed encyclopaedia or yellow pages or sears these days? All in a pittance of their former self. The ability to do distributed trusted transactions will change how business is done. How and when is another question.
  - Jasper_ 4y ago
    That argument was not used in the early Internet stages. Even back when it was proprietary bulletin boards solely for use in universities, people were already communicating, and sharing news articles on it. The Web started as an internal CERN project in 1989. In 1993, the code was released to the public and email lists were set up by CERN. In 1994, SCO and Mosaic had already partnered with Pizza Hut to allow ordering Pizza online. Yahoo! and Amazon were both founded in 1994. https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Aug/57 https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Aug/57 The arguments against the Internet were not because people thought the technology was useless, but just push-back against grandiose claims that the Internet would solve war, or famine, or education. John Sculley's job was to sell Apple Macs to classrooms, and often said stuff like this: > Imagine a classroom with a window on all the world's knowledge. Imagine a teacher with the capability to bring to life any image, any sound, any event. Imagine a student with the power to visit any place on earth at any time in history. Imagine a screen that can display in vivid color the inner workings of a cell, the births and deaths of stars, the clashed of aries, and the triumphs of art. And then imagine that you have access to all of this and more by exerting little more effort than simply asking that it appear. It seems like magic even today. Yet the ability to provide this kind of learning environment is within our grasp. The famous Clifford Stoll article was pushing against rhetoric like that, not against the Internet as a whole.
dub 4y ago
A challenge for the crypto world is that the values of being decentralized and trustworthy seem a bit at odds with the value of rapidly evolving. If you compare the Amazon or Google of 1999 vs today, they're practically different businesses. Most well-funded, centralized businesses have a hard time evolving at all, let alone to that degree. Seems like the challenges facing a decentralized organization wanting to evolve would be even larger.
theptip 4y ago
> If Bitcoin is the equivalent of Yahoo, what are the equivalents of Amazon and Google? I’ve been thinking in a similar direction recently. I think it was Doctorow that pointed out the decentralization->centralization progression of the web due to the time lag for big players to understanding the value prop and gradually iterate on their offerings (eg Google taking over email with Gmail). My guess here is that the centralized systems to learn the lessons from crypto will be the Visa, Mastercard, NACHA, and the Fed. Perhaps we’ll see a smart contract platform built into existing exchanges like NASDAQ. The blockchain bit will fall away for the most part because the big guys will not actually let the “trustless” system become the seat of power in the economy. And you can build all of the business-facing features without a distributed ledger. (Trivial existence proof - just run a private ETH blockchain and expose a public API for it. This is kind of the Ripple approach here, cutting big deals with existing players.) Reversability and “right to deletion” will trump trustless because most of the actual market participants want the former and not the latter. Note, I think there is a different analysis for the US, EU etc (with functioning, stable economies with huge financial service industries resisting power shifts) and basket-case economies like Argentina and Zimbabwe. Perhaps the people in Argentina will continue to use blockchain as an alternative financial system in the absence of a long-term stable economy. But I don’t think this will be the outcome in the US.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  >The blockchain bit will fall away for the most part because the big guys will not actually let the “trustless” system become the seat of power in the economy. its not the big guys who forced crypto to adopt a centralised scam coin like Tether. the vast majority of "crypto" transactions happen on centralised exchanges. the "blockchain bit" didnt matter to begin with.
- legutierr 4y ago
  > Reversability and “right to deletion” will trump trustless because most of the actual market participants want the former and not the latter. Does reversibility actually matter anywhere outside of consumer merchant payments? If you send a wire transfer, it can't be reversed. If you write a check, you can't reverse it once it's been cashed or deposited. You can ask for a stop payment before a check has cleared, but you can also be accused of check fraud if you ask for a stop payment under the wrong circumstances. Outside of the payments domain: if you buy stock on the stock market, you can't reverse a filled order. You can sell your stock, but you need to sell to a new buyer at a new market price. Even in the modern fintech space, not all transactions are reversible. A Zelle transaction can't be reversed, for instance: https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/86920/can-a-zelle-bank-transfer-be-reversed-or-denied-after-credit-has-been-added https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/86920/can-a-zelle-... All this is to say that true reversibility is only available in certain cases. It is something that financial institutions offer when they know that the funds recipient is a merchant in a captive relationship with a financial institution, where the merchant will most likely be able to fund the reversal by offsetting future unsettled payments that are yet to be reimbursed to the merchant. It works only because merchants are dependent on financial institutions, and do not have the negotiating power to demand instantaneous, final settlement. I very much doubt that financial institutions will want to (or will even be able to) extend reversibility to other transaction types just so as to deploy it as a strategy to prevent open blockchains from becoming predominant.
charles_kaw 4y ago
>If Bitcoin is the equivalent of Yahoo, what are the equivalents of Amazon and Google? This assumes that there is a Yahoo or Google.
- kylebenzle 4y ago

syllablehq 4y ago

Exactly: Ignore the crap, and look for the Amazons and Googles. There is so much garbage, but then there are projects like Avalanche. People love to hate on crypto and the stupid puppy coins, but meanwhile, projects like Avalanche are actually running the efficient, performant networks that everyone is shouting will never exist. It takes years to ignore fud and hype and quietly follow the fundamentals.

t_mann 4y ago
Avalanche is probably the biggest disappointment out of the whole bunch. They started out strong with a new consensus algorithm, and then they started hyping 'subnets', which turned out to be plain L1s with artificial restrictions on who can be a validator. Their tokenomics are so skewed in favour of AvaLabs and their early VC backers that they removed the pie chart from their website to conceal it. It's probably the most centralized out of all the wannabe Ethereums, with Emin singlehandedly calling the shots (how much needs to be staked to be a validator, whether subnet validators need to be whitelisted...), and they don't seem to have much of an idea where they're going (they went from bashing L2s and saying subnets are so much better to saying 'let's build L2s, ours will be so much better than Ethereum's'; they still haven't managed to build a bridging solution between subnets and they seem to have given up on that, given that they don't seem capable of competing with the existing interoperability protocols that treat subnets like any other chain, Avalanche-related or not). They also lost an 8-figure sum from the Terra collapse (Emin himself promoted UST after the depeg had started), which does not bode well for an ecosystem where they are still the only truly active entity promoting new projects. They're more than ripe for replacement by a standalone EVM-compatible chain that takes the only thing that's genuinely innovative about Avalanche, the consensus algorithms, and leaves the rest to the community (ie an actually decentralized project).
NetOpWibby 4y ago
I feel this with Handshake as well.
pavlov 4y ago
What are the must-use applications on Avalanche? When I first paid for dial-up Internet in 1993, it was pre-web, just clunky text-mode telnet, but the apps were obviously attractive: IRC, email, Usenet, ftp. Talk to anyone in the world, download latest stuff for free! Same with www a few years later. The dot-com business schemes may have been harebrained but the underlying protocol’s usage was growing exponentially because people couldn’t get enough of the things you could find on the web. What’s the thing on Avalanche that would keep me coming back every day, like dial-up Internet and web did?
- ertian 4y ago
  I suspect we're not really at the equivalent of 1993. We may still be back in the early 80s, with people exchanging bang paths and oohing and ahhing when an email goes through. 'Real' applications are thin on the ground, largely driven by novelty, and not particularly visible to the public. In most cases, wide-area networks can't compete with a phone call or a station wagon full of floppy disks. There's a bunch of competing approaches; it's not clear which will win, and surely most will fail, but all have devoted adherents. The important standards and protocols may still be in the future, or are obscured by piles of false leads, mistakes, and outright scams. The thing is, we now exist in a post-internet environment where people are well aware of the transformative ability of technology. They're all looking for the Next Big Thing in a way that people just weren't in the 70s and 80s. The population of the world has doubled, and the share of those people who are trying to keep up with the cutting edge is _vastly_ higher. On top of that we're talking about a network of value, i.e. money, and so there's inherently money to be made--and it's accessible to the average Joe. All together, you've got the recipe for a blizzard of hype and excitement that obscures the real innovations that underlie it all. And that's unavoidable. Any exciting new technology with the potential to have a serious impact on society is inevitably going to trigger a blizzard of hype--and an equivalent blizzard of skepticism. That makes the whole process exhausting. Par for the course in 2022.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    A lot of 1980s hype technologies fizzled out. Take CD-ROM, which enjoyed crypto-level multi-year hype before anyone even had a player. None of the companies that invested heavily in CD-ROM were winners. We’re not enjoying our multimedia entertainment on platforms provided by Philips and Sega and Sierra On-Line. There were no Googles or Amazons arising from that massive tech hype cycle. In twenty years, the notion of “I’ll store value using my cryptocurrency wallet” may sound as anachronistic and outdated as “I’ll enjoy a night home browsing hot multimedia content on a Philips CDi disc.”

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

Today I read this article https://tweakers.net/geek/196920/terug-in-de-tijd-9-dot-combubble-msn-crazybytes-en-byebye-dynabyte.html https://tweakers.net/geek/196920/terug-in-de-tijd-9-dot-comb... WorldCom was a company that was going to buy Sprint for 129 billion dollars. A few years later it was struck from the corporate history books. In capitalism things can just evaporate.

highwaylights 4y ago

Who are the equivalents of Amazon and Google? Amazon and Google. This has been my biggest issue with cultocurrency since it’s inception. The market cap of the whole lot is made up of maybe 0.04% innovative signing and 99.96% magic beans. Useful use cases of the smidge of innovation can be exploited by the megacaps to extract whatever actual value there is - this current cesspit of Ponzi schemes will not be required.

ricw 4y ago
That argument was used in the early internet stages too, and hasn’t aged well. Where are printed encyclopaedia or yellow pages or sears these days? All in a pittance of their former self. The ability to do distributed trusted transactions will change how business is done. How and when is another question.
- Jasper_ 4y ago
  That argument was not used in the early Internet stages. Even back when it was proprietary bulletin boards solely for use in universities, people were already communicating, and sharing news articles on it. The Web started as an internal CERN project in 1989. In 1993, the code was released to the public and email lists were set up by CERN. In 1994, SCO and Mosaic had already partnered with Pizza Hut to allow ordering Pizza online. Yahoo! and Amazon were both founded in 1994. https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Aug/57 https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Aug/57 The arguments against the Internet were not because people thought the technology was useless, but just push-back against grandiose claims that the Internet would solve war, or famine, or education. John Sculley's job was to sell Apple Macs to classrooms, and often said stuff like this: > Imagine a classroom with a window on all the world's knowledge. Imagine a teacher with the capability to bring to life any image, any sound, any event. Imagine a student with the power to visit any place on earth at any time in history. Imagine a screen that can display in vivid color the inner workings of a cell, the births and deaths of stars, the clashed of aries, and the triumphs of art. And then imagine that you have access to all of this and more by exerting little more effort than simply asking that it appear. It seems like magic even today. Yet the ability to provide this kind of learning environment is within our grasp. The famous Clifford Stoll article was pushing against rhetoric like that, not against the Internet as a whole.

dub 4y ago

A challenge for the crypto world is that the values of being decentralized and trustworthy seem a bit at odds with the value of rapidly evolving. If you compare the Amazon or Google of 1999 vs today, they're practically different businesses. Most well-funded, centralized businesses have a hard time evolving at all, let alone to that degree. Seems like the challenges facing a decentralized organization wanting to evolve would be even larger.

theptip 4y ago

> If Bitcoin is the equivalent of Yahoo, what are the equivalents of Amazon and Google? I’ve been thinking in a similar direction recently. I think it was Doctorow that pointed out the decentralization->centralization progression of the web due to the time lag for big players to understanding the value prop and gradually iterate on their offerings (eg Google taking over email with Gmail). My guess here is that the centralized systems to learn the lessons from crypto will be the Visa, Mastercard, NACHA, and the Fed. Perhaps we’ll see a smart contract platform built into existing exchanges like NASDAQ. The blockchain bit will fall away for the most part because the big guys will not actually let the “trustless” system become the seat of power in the economy. And you can build all of the business-facing features without a distributed ledger. (Trivial existence proof - just run a private ETH blockchain and expose a public API for it. This is kind of the Ripple approach here, cutting big deals with existing players.) Reversability and “right to deletion” will trump trustless because most of the actual market participants want the former and not the latter. Note, I think there is a different analysis for the US, EU etc (with functioning, stable economies with huge financial service industries resisting power shifts) and basket-case economies like Argentina and Zimbabwe. Perhaps the people in Argentina will continue to use blockchain as an alternative financial system in the absence of a long-term stable economy. But I don’t think this will be the outcome in the US.

cuteboy19 4y ago
>The blockchain bit will fall away for the most part because the big guys will not actually let the “trustless” system become the seat of power in the economy. its not the big guys who forced crypto to adopt a centralised scam coin like Tether. the vast majority of "crypto" transactions happen on centralised exchanges. the "blockchain bit" didnt matter to begin with.
legutierr 4y ago
> Reversability and “right to deletion” will trump trustless because most of the actual market participants want the former and not the latter. Does reversibility actually matter anywhere outside of consumer merchant payments? If you send a wire transfer, it can't be reversed. If you write a check, you can't reverse it once it's been cashed or deposited. You can ask for a stop payment before a check has cleared, but you can also be accused of check fraud if you ask for a stop payment under the wrong circumstances. Outside of the payments domain: if you buy stock on the stock market, you can't reverse a filled order. You can sell your stock, but you need to sell to a new buyer at a new market price. Even in the modern fintech space, not all transactions are reversible. A Zelle transaction can't be reversed, for instance: https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/86920/can-a-zelle-bank-transfer-be-reversed-or-denied-after-credit-has-been-added https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/86920/can-a-zelle-... All this is to say that true reversibility is only available in certain cases. It is something that financial institutions offer when they know that the funds recipient is a merchant in a captive relationship with a financial institution, where the merchant will most likely be able to fund the reversal by offsetting future unsettled payments that are yet to be reimbursed to the merchant. It works only because merchants are dependent on financial institutions, and do not have the negotiating power to demand instantaneous, final settlement. I very much doubt that financial institutions will want to (or will even be able to) extend reversibility to other transaction types just so as to deploy it as a strategy to prevent open blockchains from becoming predominant.

charles_kaw 4y ago

>If Bitcoin is the equivalent of Yahoo, what are the equivalents of Amazon and Google? This assumes that there is a Yahoo or Google.

kylebenzle 4y ago