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Regarding (1), the real statement here is, "many of us were there at the start of the Web, it was evident that it was going to change the world, and it was usab

Regarding (1), the real statement here is, "many of us were there at the start of the Web, it was evident that it was going to change the world, and it was usable from the start." And it's mostly about the the Web (but you may include things like The Well, which were promising from the start.) The point is really about immediately apparent use. And, if you're going to date the Web back to the humble beginnings of ARPANET in the early 1970s, you've to include hashes published in the NYT classifieds in the 1970s/1980s for crypto, as well. Regarding (2), why not have a functional implementation right from the beginning? (Analogously, why have a really bad OS fixed by the application layer?) The point in (3) is really about availability and value in times of crisis. Gold is already mined, as you hold it.

lucideer 4y ago
To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with the intent behind the article, I just think the execution is exceptionally poor. If you're going to argue against something, make your arguments compelling (your comment's first point is, the author's wasn't). On your second & third points: 2: Improving tech over time is good. Creating perfect tech on day 1 isn't realistic. The early internet was built on a lot of tech we no longer use (or are a attempting to move away from) 3: The "I already have gold but no bitcoin in a time of crisis" qualifier seems odd and contrived. Gold is a resource valued for its scarcity, Bitcoin is an attempt to move away from artificial scarcity of fiat to mathematically guaranteed scarcity. Ultimately they share problems: mining of physical goods is environmentally destructive and tying economic prosperity to inflating resource value based on scarcity instead of utility is also ultimately problematic for society in the long term. So the analogy does work -they're fundamentally very comparable. The primary differentiators are (a) the scale of cryptomining is greater per-unit than for physical resources (+ transactional impact), and (b) Bitcoin's got a whole load of extra bad problems that gold doesn't: e.g. instability.
- landemva 4y ago
  > tying economic prosperity to inflating resource value based on scarcity instead of utility Why would the store of value or the unit of account or the medium of exchange (the money) determine prosperity? The public accounting ledger provides transparency and auditability as a service which can reduce friction to economic prosperity. Neither gold nor Bitcoin creates a fun day at the beach - or whatever your measure of prosperity may be.
game-of-throws 4y ago
> it was evident that it was going to change the world That's easy to say in hindsight, but the utility of the internet was debated as hotly back then as the utility of cryptocurrency is today. > By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-effect-economy/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...
- masswerk 4y ago
  It isn't so that the Web wouldn't have gone from boom to bust rather immediately (it really began to surface and become known to a broader public in around 1996 and about 4 years later, there was already the burst of the dot-com bubble), but it was immediately apparent that the Web still had use and that there were plenty of undeveloped use-cases. Not sure, if this applies to the crypto market, as well.
- danaris 4y ago
  The difference is that many, many people who were not directly financially invested in the internet in, say, 1997 could easily see that it was revolutionary. Most of the people who pooh-poohed it were those who were not highly technical and did not understand the technology that well. (Krugman's an expert in his field, but his field is not technology.) Today, effectively the only people still saying cryptocurrency is revolutionary are those who are directly financially invested in it—and there are many, many highly technical people who understand the technology very well who say it's nothing but a scam.
matthewdgreen 4y ago
This is all pretty arbitrary. In the context of pure engineering timelines, you don’t get to just pick arbitrary starting points. The Internet took decades to reach “I can buy cat food from my home PC” because that’s how long it took the underlying computing and networking technologies to go from the first recognizable proto-technologies to the point where they enabled mass-market usage. If you start your clock in 1994 (or 2007) you can make that time look shorter, but it doesn’t change anything. Similarly Uber was able to launch a GPS-based smartphone app only a few years after the first smartphone, because the technologies of 3G cellular, OS, portable computing, GUI, GPS, distributed systems etc. were all extremely mature by the time the smartphone launched. But if you measure from earlier points in the “portable computing” timeline you can make Uber look like a multi-decade pipe dream. There’s no reason to believe that the technical barriers facing cryptocurrency (scaling, UI, key management) will follow dramatically slower or faster tech development curves than those previous technologies. There are still plenty of reasons to question whether there’s a “killer app” once the tech issues are sorted out, but they clearly aren’t yet.

lucideer 4y ago

To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with the intent behind the article, I just think the execution is exceptionally poor. If you're going to argue against something, make your arguments compelling (your comment's first point is, the author's wasn't). On your second & third points: 2: Improving tech over time is good. Creating perfect tech on day 1 isn't realistic. The early internet was built on a lot of tech we no longer use (or are a attempting to move away from) 3: The "I already have gold but no bitcoin in a time of crisis" qualifier seems odd and contrived. Gold is a resource valued for its scarcity, Bitcoin is an attempt to move away from artificial scarcity of fiat to mathematically guaranteed scarcity. Ultimately they share problems: mining of physical goods is environmentally destructive and tying economic prosperity to inflating resource value based on scarcity instead of utility is also ultimately problematic for society in the long term. So the analogy does work -they're fundamentally very comparable. The primary differentiators are (a) the scale of cryptomining is greater per-unit than for physical resources (+ transactional impact), and (b) Bitcoin's got a whole load of extra bad problems that gold doesn't: e.g. instability.

landemva 4y ago
> tying economic prosperity to inflating resource value based on scarcity instead of utility Why would the store of value or the unit of account or the medium of exchange (the money) determine prosperity? The public accounting ledger provides transparency and auditability as a service which can reduce friction to economic prosperity. Neither gold nor Bitcoin creates a fun day at the beach - or whatever your measure of prosperity may be.

game-of-throws 4y ago

> it was evident that it was going to change the world That's easy to say in hindsight, but the utility of the internet was debated as hotly back then as the utility of cryptocurrency is today. > By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-effect-economy/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...

masswerk 4y ago
It isn't so that the Web wouldn't have gone from boom to bust rather immediately (it really began to surface and become known to a broader public in around 1996 and about 4 years later, there was already the burst of the dot-com bubble), but it was immediately apparent that the Web still had use and that there were plenty of undeveloped use-cases. Not sure, if this applies to the crypto market, as well.
danaris 4y ago
The difference is that many, many people who were not directly financially invested in the internet in, say, 1997 could easily see that it was revolutionary. Most of the people who pooh-poohed it were those who were not highly technical and did not understand the technology that well. (Krugman's an expert in his field, but his field is not technology.) Today, effectively the only people still saying cryptocurrency is revolutionary are those who are directly financially invested in it—and there are many, many highly technical people who understand the technology very well who say it's nothing but a scam.

matthewdgreen 4y ago

This is all pretty arbitrary. In the context of pure engineering timelines, you don’t get to just pick arbitrary starting points. The Internet took decades to reach “I can buy cat food from my home PC” because that’s how long it took the underlying computing and networking technologies to go from the first recognizable proto-technologies to the point where they enabled mass-market usage. If you start your clock in 1994 (or 2007) you can make that time look shorter, but it doesn’t change anything. Similarly Uber was able to launch a GPS-based smartphone app only a few years after the first smartphone, because the technologies of 3G cellular, OS, portable computing, GUI, GPS, distributed systems etc. were all extremely mature by the time the smartphone launched. But if you measure from earlier points in the “portable computing” timeline you can make Uber look like a multi-decade pipe dream. There’s no reason to believe that the technical barriers facing cryptocurrency (scaling, UI, key management) will follow dramatically slower or faster tech development curves than those previous technologies. There are still plenty of reasons to question whether there’s a “killer app” once the tech issues are sorted out, but they clearly aren’t yet.