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When will the blockchain ecosystem provide something with that "WOW I need this in my life right now" factor to the average user? Google went from a research p

When will the blockchain ecosystem provide something with that "WOW I need this in my life right now" factor to the average user? Google went from a research project to incorporated and usable on the internet in roughly two years with a total investment of about $2mm in 2022 money. Let's just say the pace of innovation had some serious roadblocks at the time (they literally had to build their own servers and host them in a garage). Not to mention the status of dev tools, frameworks/libraries, developer availability, etc in 1998 vs today. We are four years in to A16z alone raising roughly $16 BILLION dollars with their crypto funds. For at least half a decade it's been routine to see announcements of various blockchain companies with $5mm seed rounds (and beyond). Follow-up Series A and beyond in the hundreds of millions with multi-billion dollar valuations. I've been following the space extremely closely for over five years and I have yet to see an application or solution with that "WOW I need this in my life right now" factor. I still don't know a single person outside of the tech scene that uses anything blockchain related other than trading on an exchange. Bitcoin is 13 years old with an ecosystem that has had an incredible amount of investment and man hours thrown at it yet we're still getting research papers on how to make the original premise of bitcoin (Peer to peer digital cash) actually usable at any practical scale. I know LN has been live for some time yet looking at the best available numbers I can find it's only being used by an absolutely insignificant number of the world's five billion internet users (this goes for all other chains and L2+ that can be analyzed). I don't get it.

eldenwrong 4y ago
Yeah sending value through the internet without an intermediary that can't be stopped, confiscated or censored is whatever Maybe the problem is that you lack an understanding of what money should be and what problems banking and fiat have?
- threeseed 4y ago
  I would argue the negatives outweigh the positives here: Tax evasion, money laundering, trafficking, drugs, sanctions evasion etc. Since the introduction of KYC it's very hard to do any of these in the traditional finance system. And each of them has very serious implications for people's lives.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - eldenwrong 4y ago
    You must be joking. What exactly has stopped since KYC? Absolutely nothing. The ones doing the laundering are literally the banks/governments/big corps. KYC was just an excuse to increase surveillance
  - lrvick 4y ago
    I suppose you want cash and art banned too? Those are even better money laundering tools than Bitcoin.
    - CharlesW 4y ago
      > Those are even better money laundering tools than Bitcoin. How are cash and art better for money laundering than Bitcoin?
      - eldenwrong 4y ago
        Cash is untraceable....? Although Bitcoin will reach that point as well
        lrvick 4y ago
        Cash is traceable in a similar way to Bitcoin. Investigators frequently follow the serial numbers of large bills to track down criminal transactions. Banks even help.
      - lrvick 4y ago
        “Hey, I will give you this trunk full of cocaine if you make sure to win one of my relatively unknown paintings at the next auction for a least $1m. My friend will bid it up that high for you to take the win. You probably can not resell it for that, but donate it to a museum and take a $1m tax write off for your trouble” Money spent to buy the art is clean in one shot because art is worth whatever someone pays for it and it is hard for an investigator to prove you didn't simply -really- want that particular painting. Someone showing up to a bitcoin exchange with $1m in BTC trying to convert it to cash is going to invite law enforcement questions about the source of those funds really fast. Art remains one of the most effective money laundering and tax evasion tools.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  I do understand that use case and it has value. Question is - what portion of the 5 billion internet users see that as enough value to enter the space? I have friends that have fled war torn countries, dictatorships, etc and I'm glad blockchain now exists for that scenario but again - can that use case (fortunately very rare) justify tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars of investment and over 10 years of work? This is what I don't understand. I understand banking has problems (fiat is a much longer debate). What needs to be understood is how many of the 5 billion internet users think the benefit of blockchain justifies throwing out the entire financial (and often legal) system and operating in a parallel one? Not to mention the willingness of average people to essentially be their own bank. For this reason alone I think blockchain is a non-starter for the overwhelming majority of internet users. How many people care? Answer is: a tiny portion. A very optimistic estimate of total blockchain "users" worldwide is in the range of 100m. 13 years and untold billions of dollars of investment to reach 2% adoption of the internet population isn't exactly a success story that speaks well to the utility of the solutions provided and the real world problems they solve.
- hamter 4y ago
  you still need to do kyc to convert to real money, which is essentially the same as transferwise for example
- imtringued 4y ago
  >Maybe the problem is that you lack an understanding of what money should be and what problems banking and fiat have? I don't believe people are capable of grasping the nature of money. Money is supposed to be a medium of exchange yet everyone wants to turn it into a forced store of value with no consent, that is basically the equivalent of slavery.
  - eldenwrong 4y ago
    Money is supposed to be both. The problem is that money as a store of value is very bad for low quality consumerism
skinnyasianboi 4y ago
I don't know if it falls in the tech category but people play games without knowing there is a blockchain behind it.
- hamter 4y ago
  which ones
bananarchist 4y ago
No user has ever said "WOW I need Google search engine in my life right now" they said "WOW I need some gotdang funny cat pics" and google proved a means to resolve that desire. Similarly, no one will ever say "WOW I need blockchain in my life right now" but they might say "WOW I need to send some money" or "WOW some of my friends are making their money work for them maybe I too should do some speculating" or "WOW I distrust the government's control over the financial system" and blockchain will occasionally prove to scratch that itch.
- mullingitover 4y ago
  > No user has ever said "WOW I need Google search engine in my life right now" I sure did, and I wasn't alone. I remember thinking the existing search engines were trash long before google came around. The market was starving for a search engine that was user-focused and not 200% bought and paid for by marketers.
  - v4dok 4y ago
    Wait, did you describe what Google is currently?
    - mullingitover 4y ago
      Yep, the launch of Google Plus is pretty much the historic marker where Google turned into everything they originally criticized.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  Correct - no one asked for Google but it provided instant value and utility to anyone walking down the street inside of two years with $2mm. "WOW I need to send some money". Enter: PayPal, Venmo, Trust Wise, and any number of others. There are plenty of ways to gamble and speculate without touching blockchain if that's your thing. What's amazing is even a mafia bookie or the shadiest of casinos won't pull a Celsius on you. Don't trust the government? With blockchain you're expected to completely trust yourself and any number of shady characters in the blockchain space. Clicked the wrong link and your wallet got hacked? Sorry. Forget your seed/passphrase? Sorry. Some defi exchange with a buggy smart contract (as if there are any that don't have bugs)? Sorry. Picked the wrong exchange and the people behind it faked their own death and disappeared with your money? Sorry. The list goes on and on. Other than the absolute worst and shadiest governments in the world do you trust these factors and actors more? Does anyone else?
nwiswell 4y ago
Broadly I agree with the argument that crypto is taking an awful long time to come up with the killer app, but this is not a fair analysis. Let's be clear: when Google exploded, that was the growth of the Internet in the driver's seat, not demand for Google specifically. Google's growth was a side effect of the exponential growth of the internet because it solved a need where there was no adequate incumbent solution, and where demand for that solution was growing exponentially for reasons basically unrelated to the quality of the solution. This isn't the case for crypto, because there's an incumbent solution that works fine. More specifically, in our analogy, money is the counterpart of the Internet. Crypto is in the position of needing to slowly sap market share from an incumbent (government fiat) in the same way that, for example, DuckDuckGo does even if you feel it's a superior product. If Bitcoin was the first-ever instance of money, I assure you its growth profile would look like Google's did.
- ALittleLight 4y ago
  I think this is less about growth factor and more about "killer app". The killer application of Google is that it actually finds what you are searching for really well (well, it did). That's what set Google apart from other search engines. The killer feature of crypto is...? DAOs, NFTs, smart contracts, random tokens all seem less like good features and more like transparent scams or terrible ideas that don't work. It's fine if adoption is slow - but there should actually be something beyond Ponzi schemers and hackers stealing from each other. Drugs and tax evasion, sure, but how far does that take you?
  - ftlio 4y ago
    What was money's killer app? Bitcoin is money from the ground up. It's going fantastically fast. As for smart contracts, these are the basis of Bitcoin. A permissionless ledger inherently requires smart contracts. Their killer app is a a distributed ledger. There are already a few different contracts that can be made on Bitcoin that allow for different custodial schemes. What people are selling as far as DAOs, NFTs, and "smart contracts" where they mean are better and more sophisticated than Bitcoin, can all be favorably described as the application of Bitcoin's critique of money to the issuance and governance of other tokens representing other forms of property, and are inherently more complex. Least favorably described, they are scams to boost leverage powered attacks. The middle of the road might be that they're the naive notion that building more complex constructs on top of what Bitcoin defined is immediately achievable without compromising invariants that matter for useful money. All to say that the "killer app" critique of Bitcoin probably ins't the best lens, and that if it's more complicated than custody and payments, especially for people where that isn't readily available, it's probably further out than is survivable for a single company requiring the kind of trajectory of those that create "apps".
olalonde 4y ago
Bitcoin is not a concrete product like Google Search or a smartphone. It's more of an idea, like free speech. The idea being money without a central authority, something that has never really existed before (digitally, at least). No one woke up one day and thought "WOW I need democracy" or "WOW I need free speech". It's abstract and doesn't gratify immediately. The average person does not even have a conception that money could be something entirely different. Also, Bitcoin threatens the status quo in a massive way. Not only private businesses like banks but also powerful entities like governments and intergovernmental organizations. Needless to say, I don't expect adoption to be comparable to that of a web search engine.
- kkielhofner 4y ago
  I use these examples in layers (I have a networking background so my mind more or less thinks in OSI layers). For actual products bitcoin (and blockchains like Ethereum with EVM) are the fundamental enabling layer. I like to think of them somewhat akin to TCP/IP or even HTTP. Where are the higher layer applications and use cases built on blockchain with instant and obvious utility to the average person walking down the street? This is what I was getting at with the decade plus of development and billions of dollars of investment. The internet was a fundamental threat to all kinds of institutions - governments with censorship, big media (including state run), and even financial institutions. The internet provided instant untold value for democracy and free speech. Just widespread and instantly available encryption itself was a HUGE problem and threat to governments, law enforcement, militaries, intelligence agencies, etc. Remember the Clipper Chip "debate" and 40 bit encryption export controls? I do. Yet the obvious value and utility was so clear even governments like China (with the Great Firewall) knew it was of such incredible value to the economy and clamored for by the citizenry they figured out a way to make it work within their system of government. Inside of a decade billions of people were using the internet to further democracy, free speech, and the dissemination of information.
  - olalonde 4y ago
    I agree that the Internet's utility is more obvious than Bitcoin. Bitcoin has little or even negative value to authoritarians. Even in more liberal countries, financial sovereignty and privacy are not generally viewed as important. But to me, this is just more reason to believe that the pace of adoption will be slow and gradual.
lrvick 4y ago
It is really important to understand that decentralized systems take dramatically longer to upgrade, and thus to mature, than centralized systems. They also tend to last forever once established: see e-mail.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  Aren’t the vast majority of people using corporate email or one of the big handful of email providers? Being mostly a status quo and corporate prop doesn’t seem like an advantage
  - lrvick 4y ago
    Even if there were only two, it still gives users choice to leave and take their email with them, especially if they bring their own domain. Some orgs still self host. Choice is what matters.
    - skinnymuch 4y ago
      Sure, I’d still posit having a more distributed and less top heavy society is more important than being a status quo of a few oligopolies controlling 90%+ but people can self host
nayuki 4y ago
> When will the blockchain ecosystem provide something [...] to the average user? > Google went from a research project to incorporated and usable on the internet in roughly two years I don't think this is a fair comparison. Google is a late bloomer, being preceded by lukewarm online services AltaVista, Yahoo!, and AOL. Just like how Facebook became successful when MySpace did not, the latecomer can have a substantial advantage in speed and scale. Moreover, Google is an application. The Internet is a platform. Google was founded several decades after the Internet. The first few decades of the Internet were clunky, slow, and expensive. I would compare Bitcoin to the Internet. It is the raw, unsightly engine room that most people should not directly tinker with. Where are the killer applications that will run on top of Bitcoin? We're still figuring that out.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  Even if Google is a late bloomer, 13 years didn’t pass since Altavista began. In Bitcoin timeline it was a baby, which seems pretty weird and like a problem. I don’t see why Bitcoin should be compared to the internet and why Google’s timeline should be compared to the internet vs world wide web.
tim333 4y ago
> The "WOW I need this in my life right now" factor is making money through the price of the assets going up. Which you may say is ponzi but the majority of the UK economy seems people making money through assets (housing mostly) going up. I can see younger people saying I can't afford a house but maybe I'll buy some bitcoin or similar maybe that will go up.

eldenwrong 4y ago

Yeah sending value through the internet without an intermediary that can't be stopped, confiscated or censored is whatever Maybe the problem is that you lack an understanding of what money should be and what problems banking and fiat have?

threeseed 4y ago
I would argue the negatives outweigh the positives here: Tax evasion, money laundering, trafficking, drugs, sanctions evasion etc. Since the introduction of KYC it's very hard to do any of these in the traditional finance system. And each of them has very serious implications for people's lives.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- eldenwrong 4y ago
  You must be joking. What exactly has stopped since KYC? Absolutely nothing. The ones doing the laundering are literally the banks/governments/big corps. KYC was just an excuse to increase surveillance
- lrvick 4y ago
  I suppose you want cash and art banned too? Those are even better money laundering tools than Bitcoin.
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    > Those are even better money laundering tools than Bitcoin. How are cash and art better for money laundering than Bitcoin?
    - eldenwrong 4y ago
      Cash is untraceable....? Although Bitcoin will reach that point as well
      - lrvick 4y ago
        Cash is traceable in a similar way to Bitcoin. Investigators frequently follow the serial numbers of large bills to track down criminal transactions. Banks even help.
    - lrvick 4y ago
      “Hey, I will give you this trunk full of cocaine if you make sure to win one of my relatively unknown paintings at the next auction for a least $1m. My friend will bid it up that high for you to take the win. You probably can not resell it for that, but donate it to a museum and take a $1m tax write off for your trouble” Money spent to buy the art is clean in one shot because art is worth whatever someone pays for it and it is hard for an investigator to prove you didn't simply -really- want that particular painting. Someone showing up to a bitcoin exchange with $1m in BTC trying to convert it to cash is going to invite law enforcement questions about the source of those funds really fast. Art remains one of the most effective money laundering and tax evasion tools.
kkielhofner 4y ago
I do understand that use case and it has value. Question is - what portion of the 5 billion internet users see that as enough value to enter the space? I have friends that have fled war torn countries, dictatorships, etc and I'm glad blockchain now exists for that scenario but again - can that use case (fortunately very rare) justify tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars of investment and over 10 years of work? This is what I don't understand. I understand banking has problems (fiat is a much longer debate). What needs to be understood is how many of the 5 billion internet users think the benefit of blockchain justifies throwing out the entire financial (and often legal) system and operating in a parallel one? Not to mention the willingness of average people to essentially be their own bank. For this reason alone I think blockchain is a non-starter for the overwhelming majority of internet users. How many people care? Answer is: a tiny portion. A very optimistic estimate of total blockchain "users" worldwide is in the range of 100m. 13 years and untold billions of dollars of investment to reach 2% adoption of the internet population isn't exactly a success story that speaks well to the utility of the solutions provided and the real world problems they solve.
hamter 4y ago
you still need to do kyc to convert to real money, which is essentially the same as transferwise for example
imtringued 4y ago
>Maybe the problem is that you lack an understanding of what money should be and what problems banking and fiat have? I don't believe people are capable of grasping the nature of money. Money is supposed to be a medium of exchange yet everyone wants to turn it into a forced store of value with no consent, that is basically the equivalent of slavery.
- eldenwrong 4y ago
  Money is supposed to be both. The problem is that money as a store of value is very bad for low quality consumerism

skinnyasianboi 4y ago

I don't know if it falls in the tech category but people play games without knowing there is a blockchain behind it.

hamter 4y ago
which ones

bananarchist 4y ago

No user has ever said "WOW I need Google search engine in my life right now" they said "WOW I need some gotdang funny cat pics" and google proved a means to resolve that desire. Similarly, no one will ever say "WOW I need blockchain in my life right now" but they might say "WOW I need to send some money" or "WOW some of my friends are making their money work for them maybe I too should do some speculating" or "WOW I distrust the government's control over the financial system" and blockchain will occasionally prove to scratch that itch.

mullingitover 4y ago
> No user has ever said "WOW I need Google search engine in my life right now" I sure did, and I wasn't alone. I remember thinking the existing search engines were trash long before google came around. The market was starving for a search engine that was user-focused and not 200% bought and paid for by marketers.
- v4dok 4y ago
  Wait, did you describe what Google is currently?
  - mullingitover 4y ago
    Yep, the launch of Google Plus is pretty much the historic marker where Google turned into everything they originally criticized.
kkielhofner 4y ago
Correct - no one asked for Google but it provided instant value and utility to anyone walking down the street inside of two years with $2mm. "WOW I need to send some money". Enter: PayPal, Venmo, Trust Wise, and any number of others. There are plenty of ways to gamble and speculate without touching blockchain if that's your thing. What's amazing is even a mafia bookie or the shadiest of casinos won't pull a Celsius on you. Don't trust the government? With blockchain you're expected to completely trust yourself and any number of shady characters in the blockchain space. Clicked the wrong link and your wallet got hacked? Sorry. Forget your seed/passphrase? Sorry. Some defi exchange with a buggy smart contract (as if there are any that don't have bugs)? Sorry. Picked the wrong exchange and the people behind it faked their own death and disappeared with your money? Sorry. The list goes on and on. Other than the absolute worst and shadiest governments in the world do you trust these factors and actors more? Does anyone else?

nwiswell 4y ago

Broadly I agree with the argument that crypto is taking an awful long time to come up with the killer app, but this is not a fair analysis. Let's be clear: when Google exploded, that was the growth of the Internet in the driver's seat, not demand for Google specifically. Google's growth was a side effect of the exponential growth of the internet because it solved a need where there was no adequate incumbent solution, and where demand for that solution was growing exponentially for reasons basically unrelated to the quality of the solution. This isn't the case for crypto, because there's an incumbent solution that works fine. More specifically, in our analogy, money is the counterpart of the Internet. Crypto is in the position of needing to slowly sap market share from an incumbent (government fiat) in the same way that, for example, DuckDuckGo does even if you feel it's a superior product. If Bitcoin was the first-ever instance of money, I assure you its growth profile would look like Google's did.

ALittleLight 4y ago
I think this is less about growth factor and more about "killer app". The killer application of Google is that it actually finds what you are searching for really well (well, it did). That's what set Google apart from other search engines. The killer feature of crypto is...? DAOs, NFTs, smart contracts, random tokens all seem less like good features and more like transparent scams or terrible ideas that don't work. It's fine if adoption is slow - but there should actually be something beyond Ponzi schemers and hackers stealing from each other. Drugs and tax evasion, sure, but how far does that take you?
- ftlio 4y ago
  What was money's killer app? Bitcoin is money from the ground up. It's going fantastically fast. As for smart contracts, these are the basis of Bitcoin. A permissionless ledger inherently requires smart contracts. Their killer app is a a distributed ledger. There are already a few different contracts that can be made on Bitcoin that allow for different custodial schemes. What people are selling as far as DAOs, NFTs, and "smart contracts" where they mean are better and more sophisticated than Bitcoin, can all be favorably described as the application of Bitcoin's critique of money to the issuance and governance of other tokens representing other forms of property, and are inherently more complex. Least favorably described, they are scams to boost leverage powered attacks. The middle of the road might be that they're the naive notion that building more complex constructs on top of what Bitcoin defined is immediately achievable without compromising invariants that matter for useful money. All to say that the "killer app" critique of Bitcoin probably ins't the best lens, and that if it's more complicated than custody and payments, especially for people where that isn't readily available, it's probably further out than is survivable for a single company requiring the kind of trajectory of those that create "apps".

olalonde 4y ago

Bitcoin is not a concrete product like Google Search or a smartphone. It's more of an idea, like free speech. The idea being money without a central authority, something that has never really existed before (digitally, at least). No one woke up one day and thought "WOW I need democracy" or "WOW I need free speech". It's abstract and doesn't gratify immediately. The average person does not even have a conception that money could be something entirely different. Also, Bitcoin threatens the status quo in a massive way. Not only private businesses like banks but also powerful entities like governments and intergovernmental organizations. Needless to say, I don't expect adoption to be comparable to that of a web search engine.

kkielhofner 4y ago
I use these examples in layers (I have a networking background so my mind more or less thinks in OSI layers). For actual products bitcoin (and blockchains like Ethereum with EVM) are the fundamental enabling layer. I like to think of them somewhat akin to TCP/IP or even HTTP. Where are the higher layer applications and use cases built on blockchain with instant and obvious utility to the average person walking down the street? This is what I was getting at with the decade plus of development and billions of dollars of investment. The internet was a fundamental threat to all kinds of institutions - governments with censorship, big media (including state run), and even financial institutions. The internet provided instant untold value for democracy and free speech. Just widespread and instantly available encryption itself was a HUGE problem and threat to governments, law enforcement, militaries, intelligence agencies, etc. Remember the Clipper Chip "debate" and 40 bit encryption export controls? I do. Yet the obvious value and utility was so clear even governments like China (with the Great Firewall) knew it was of such incredible value to the economy and clamored for by the citizenry they figured out a way to make it work within their system of government. Inside of a decade billions of people were using the internet to further democracy, free speech, and the dissemination of information.
- olalonde 4y ago
  I agree that the Internet's utility is more obvious than Bitcoin. Bitcoin has little or even negative value to authoritarians. Even in more liberal countries, financial sovereignty and privacy are not generally viewed as important. But to me, this is just more reason to believe that the pace of adoption will be slow and gradual.

lrvick 4y ago

It is really important to understand that decentralized systems take dramatically longer to upgrade, and thus to mature, than centralized systems. They also tend to last forever once established: see e-mail.

skinnymuch 4y ago
Aren’t the vast majority of people using corporate email or one of the big handful of email providers? Being mostly a status quo and corporate prop doesn’t seem like an advantage
- lrvick 4y ago
  Even if there were only two, it still gives users choice to leave and take their email with them, especially if they bring their own domain. Some orgs still self host. Choice is what matters.
  - skinnymuch 4y ago
    Sure, I’d still posit having a more distributed and less top heavy society is more important than being a status quo of a few oligopolies controlling 90%+ but people can self host

nayuki 4y ago

> When will the blockchain ecosystem provide something [...] to the average user? > Google went from a research project to incorporated and usable on the internet in roughly two years I don't think this is a fair comparison. Google is a late bloomer, being preceded by lukewarm online services AltaVista, Yahoo!, and AOL. Just like how Facebook became successful when MySpace did not, the latecomer can have a substantial advantage in speed and scale. Moreover, Google is an application. The Internet is a platform. Google was founded several decades after the Internet. The first few decades of the Internet were clunky, slow, and expensive. I would compare Bitcoin to the Internet. It is the raw, unsightly engine room that most people should not directly tinker with. Where are the killer applications that will run on top of Bitcoin? We're still figuring that out.

skinnymuch 4y ago
Even if Google is a late bloomer, 13 years didn’t pass since Altavista began. In Bitcoin timeline it was a baby, which seems pretty weird and like a problem. I don’t see why Bitcoin should be compared to the internet and why Google’s timeline should be compared to the internet vs world wide web.

tim333 4y ago

> The "WOW I need this in my life right now" factor is making money through the price of the assets going up. Which you may say is ponzi but the majority of the UK economy seems people making money through assets (housing mostly) going up. I can see younger people saying I can't afford a house but maybe I'll buy some bitcoin or similar maybe that will go up.