14 ms·

I keep saying this, but: Bitcoin is well over 10 years old by now. In 10 years, the internet was already clearly adding a ton of value all over the place. Bitc

I keep saying this, but: Bitcoin is well over 10 years old by now. In 10 years, the internet was already clearly adding a ton of value all over the place. Bitcoin is not really a 'young technology' anymore, and the only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies, and an staggering amount of crime.

yieldcrv 4y ago
DARPAnet did what in 10 years? Where we are now as still deciding whether the equivalent of TCP/IP will be what to move forward with, and by that metric I am pretty impressed with the progress of the blockchain concept and sentiment coordination.
Taek 4y ago
When the Internet was 10 years old the year was 1987.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  But Al Gore didn't even take office until 1992.
  - mulderc 4y ago
    Al Gore was first elected to congress in 1977.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - smsm42 4y ago
    That's why he had time to invent the internet! You can't do that while being busy with congressing and stuff.
- dfabulich 4y ago
  In 1987, Usenet and email were already pretty great. (And that was all before the web!)
  - jsemrau 4y ago
    In early 1987 the number of hosts passes 10,000 [1] Space Quest - The Sarien Encounter was released in October 1986 [2] Only in 1989 Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom join the Internet. [1] https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/ https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Quest_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Quest_I
  - acdha 4y ago
    Also things like FTP and telnet had many applications, too. My grandfather is an electrical engineer and he talked about how cool it was that the company he worked for got online in the 1980s because it allowed them to get things like Fortran compiler updates or numerical libraries without having to wait for them to be shipped on floppies. My uncle used online services for his food industry business, stock trading, etc. then too.
  - threeseed 4y ago
    Also one year later IRC was invented. Killer app if ever there was one.
- ChainOfFools 4y ago
  Having heard this argument a nauseating number of times, it's fairly clear that people on both sides who say this use "the internet" when they mean "the web." So 1999 is a better "after 10 years'" benchmark here.
  - plebianRube 4y ago
    Exactly, so then lightning is the better comparison, since it just a few years old and built on bitcoin, like the web was bult on tcp/ip.
  - CodeShmode 4y ago
    The web was the killer app built on the infrastructure of the internet. The blockchain ecosystem is still building it's infrastructure.
    - westurner 4y ago
      # 1970s: The Internet (US Research Institutions, ARPA, IETF, IEEE,) TCP/IP, DNS (/etc/hosts), Routing Protocols for multiple DUN (Dial-Up Networking) links between schools, Gopher # The Web (TimBL (@CERN), IETF, W3C) HTTP, HTML: "Hyperlinks" between "Hypertext" documents; edges with "anchor text" types. [No-crypto P2P] # Web 2.0 (CoC Web Frameworks, AJAX, open source SQL, LAMP,) Interactive HTML with user-contributed-content to moderate # ~~Web 3.0~~ (W3C,) Linked Data; RDF, RDFa 5-Star Linked Data: https://5stardata.info/ https://5stardata.info/ - Use URIs in your datasets; e.g. describe the columns of the CSVs with URIs: CSVW # Web3 ("Zero-Trust") SK: Secret Key PK: Public Key Crypto P2P: resilient distributed system application architectures with no points of failure ENS (Ethereum Name Service) instead of DNS. ENS binds unique strings to accounts; just like NFTs. (A non-fungible-token is a like a coin where each bill has a unique serial number. A fungible-token is a thing that there are transactable fractions of that needn't have unique identities: US coinage, barrels of oil, ounces of gold/silver. Non-fungible tokens are indivisible: you can't tear a bill in half because there's only the one serial number (and that's actually a federal crime in the USA, to deface money). Similarly, ENS entries - which map a string to an account id (hash of a public key) - can't be split into fractions and sold, so they're Non-FTs; NFTs) (DNS is somewhat unfixably broken due to the permissiveness necessary to interact with non-DNSSEC-compliant domains resulting in downgrade attack risks: even with e.g. DNS-over-TLS, DNS-over-HTTPS, or DNS-over-QUIC securing the channel; if the DNS client does not reject DNS responses that do not have DNSSEC signatures, a DNS MITM will succeed. If you deny access to DNSSEC-unsigned domains at your DNS client config or the (maybe forwarding) DNS resolver on the router, what is the error message in the browser?)
- halostatue 4y ago
  …and it was clearly adding value all over the place. It wasn’t on the growth curve post-1992, but its value for technology companies and universities was not even a question.
  - Taek 4y ago
    People will look back at 2020 Blockchain and say it was also adding value all over the place. Decentralized storage exists, decentralized DNS exists, NFTs exist, remittances exist, and so on. Is the value marginal next to what the web does today? Sure. But its more than enough value for people 50 years from now to get rose tinted glasses around, as many are doing in this thread concerning the early internet
    - halostatue 4y ago
      People will look back at 2020 Blockchain and either say (a) crap, how did we ever get taken in by that, or (b) boy, howdy, do you remember how foolish those people were that thought this stuff was anything but a scam? There is nothing that can be done on blockchain that cannot be done cheaper, faster, easier, and more securely without blockchain. Blockchain has negative value, and no matter where you measure the start of the Internet from, it had more positive externalities fourteen years on than anything blockchain will ever have, not least because so-called "blockchain" has an insurmountable set of negative externalities that would need to be overcome if a single real-world productive use could be found for it.
- smsm42 4y ago
  What event you are counting from? The term "internet" was first used in 1974 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc675 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc675) AFAIK, but the technology has been in development since 1960s.
chrisabrams 4y ago
What country do you live in? Because I know plenty of folks in certain countries with massive inflation and projects such as bitcoin are their refuge from 100-1000% inflation a year. When you say “in 10 years” when did that 10 year time frame start and end? Are talking about the 1960s or the 1990s? Because most people I knew didn’t start using the internet regularly until the mid to late 90s or about 30 or so years after it’s inception. 10 years is still pretty early in terms of adoption. I know people who still have never used email…
- readams 4y ago
  There are a lot of much better assets to buy as an inflation hedge.
  - toolz 4y ago
    If you live in a wealthy country, yes, but if you have limited bank access and consequently likely a country with unstable fiat, which assets would you suggest are more stable for long term holding? Certainly not physical assets, as people without banking access aren't likely to have vaults or some way to protect something like gold.
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      Usually in stone (buildings/sheds), farmland, or readily usable goods that keep well/provide value (rice, dry beans, generator, fridge). Sucks if you need to run though. But usually if you're wealthy in an unwealthy/poorly banked country and can't leave for some reason, you keep your assets in the place you'd run to if you really had to.
      - toolz 4y ago
        all of those things are fine and good, but they aren't something you can easily put your savings into - you have to save up to buy most of that stuff, and you can't just horde physical items without necessary storage and protection. Further for some people these things all pose substantially more risk than bitcoin. If someone burns your sheds down or salts your farmland because you can't payoff the local rebels, you risk losing everything, with bitcoin, having poor timing on exiting the market is risky, but certainly not 100% wealth loss risk and that's without even considering the aspect that memorizing a wallets secret phrase is the only upkeep you need to hold bitcoin. All of those physical assets bear some form of time/energy to maintain/upkeep and as you mention have a strong downside of making you immobile. I'm not saying everyone should store their savings in bitcoin, but I am saying it serves a very real, potentially life changing purpose for some people and that shouldn't be discounted.
cowtools 4y ago
The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has. If there was a "super-centralized" network that already had major success (for example, imagine a world in which teletext or something was dominant before the internet) then the internet/web may have had a serious competitor. Instead, the internet was largely reverse-compatible with previous networks such as the phone network through dial-up. Additionally, the latest wave of cryptocurrency hucksters have been selling their cryptocurrencies as a solution for a problem that cryptocurrency just does not solve. It is one thing to claim that they're wrong; it's another to claim that cryptocurrency has failed its original purpose entirely.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  Of course it had to. There were absolutely successful networks. AOL (America Online) was the biggest, while CompuServe was the older one. I remember (alas) consciously choosing not to invest in .com domain names in the mid-90's because I assumed both they and AOL room names (if that was the term?) would just be passing fads on the way to whatever better newer network would exist ten years later, with a newer name system. The internet absolutely had to overcome America Online, at least in the US. (It helped that, early on, many/most people could access the internet via AOL, before local ISP's became widespread.)
- hnthrow1010 4y ago
  >The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has. This line of thinking is extremely dangerous, even moreso for something that's claiming to be a currency. This is the mentality that lead to these ponzi-like schemes; the promoters are prioritizing growth at all costs for the sole purpose of overcoming the network effects. Not because they actually built decent products.
- cmsj 4y ago
  > The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has. It's hard to imagine how one could define the growth of the Internet as anything other than network effects - its value to end users has always been a function of how many end users there are, which is literally the definition of a network effect. Edit: To expand a little, considering I don't know if you were aware of the early/mid 1990s, but in those days most people didn't have a computer at home, and in many places phone calls were charged per-minute. It was a significant thing to buy a PC and learn how to use it and pay a lot to go online.
rvz 4y ago
> Bitcoin is well over 10 years old by now. So after 10 years, is Bitcoin the only one though? > In 10 years, the internet was already clearly adding a ton of value all over the place. The Internet? In the 1980s there were virtually little to no users. Until the Web came around in the 1990s so did the dotcom speculators and then after the crash, 90% of those internet startups died. Only then the survivors added value to it. Even Web 2.0 was seen as a 'scam' [0]. I'm sure you meant the web? [0] https://www.wired.com/2005/10/web-2-0-cracks-start-to-show/ https://www.wired.com/2005/10/web-2-0-cracks-start-to-show/
victorvosk 4y ago
I agree except "an staggering amount of crime". This has been studied a lot and there is no clear evidence of more crime than normal occurring just because of bitcoin
- ghostpepper 4y ago
  Bitcoin has made it drastically easier to monetize a system once it’s been compromised
- justinator 4y ago
  Sounds pretty staggering, Two Arrested for Alleged Conspiracy to Launder $4.5 Billion in Stolen Cryptocurrency https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-alleged-conspiracy-launder-45-billion-stolen-cryptocurrency https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-alleged-conspira...
- MBCook 4y ago
  Why did ransomware explode after Bitcoin came along? Why is it (and Eth) the payment method everyone asks for? Because it’s far far easier to use for ransomware and to hide your trail than any traditional bank transaction or money transfer.
  - tremarley 4y ago
    Ransoms have been paid via Bank Wires, PayPal and other technologies for decades. 99% of internet based ransoms are still being paid via Bank Wires.
    - hollerith 4y ago
      What evidence do you have for, "99% of internet based ransoms are being paid via Bank Wires"? That would be decisive if it were true. But I always thought that it is much easier to get ill-gotten gains out of BTC than out of the banking system.
jonas21 4y ago
I'm as skeptical of Bitcoin as anyone, but this is not a very good argument. You'd come to the same conclusion if you evaluated the state of aviation in 1900 or photography in 1820. Even the Internet was useless to the average person in 1982 (13 years in).
- rossdavidh 4y ago
  None of those cases, however, had anywhere near as much money put into them that early. It may be that, if blockchain technologies had grown in size much, much slower, that good uses would have been found. Regardless, once this much real money (and the resources of electricity, labor, technical expertise, etc. that they represent) have been invested into something, something impressive should have resulted by now.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - __ryan__ 4y ago
    How much of that money was based on capitalizing on an unregulated speculative investment market? Just because a lot of resources flow in the general direction of a technology doesn’t mean it wasn’t put to misguided use.
    - rossdavidh 4y ago
      Oh, absolutely. I do think, however, that the very nature of trying to make a new currency (the first and still primary use case for blockchain) is almost inevitably going to have this problem.
- bb88 4y ago
  Humans are pretty efficient at screwing each other over, particularly when money is involved. And any technology that allows humans to screw each other over more efficiently should have the deepest skepticism possible. https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ has tracked $10B in losses due to grift. And that doesn't include the losses used to pay off ransomware. Money laundering for good is still money laundering.
Keyb0ardWarr10r 4y ago
> only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies Did you miss 2008, shitty CDOs? > and an staggering amount of crime How has BTC enabled crime more than cash?
- MBCook 4y ago
  It’s very hard to ransom a US hospital or school district from Eastern Europe (or wherever) and get paid in cash. It’s trivial to be paid in BTC.
social_quotient 4y ago
It’s interesting giving attribution of crime to Bitcoin and not the internet or hackers. The internet has facilitated a staggering amount of crime as well as the fiat currencies of the globe. Let’s suppose this 14billion dollar number of Bitcoin crime is right … https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/01/06/crypto-crime-hit-an-all-time-high-of-14b-in-2021-as-prices-climbed-chainalysis/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/01/06/crypto-crime-hit-an... Global credit card fraud hit 32billion in 2021 - https://chargebacks911.com/credit-card-fraud-statistics/ https://chargebacks911.com/credit-card-fraud-statistics/ And that’s just credit cards. It’s not wire fraud or other fraud. Why do you focus on the mode of criminality and not the crime or criminals itself? I’ll give you that Bitcoin like ALL the other value transfer mechanisms has some criminals using it but surely you aren’t suggesting Bitcoin is worthless and only provides a mechanism for crime. As for investment risk. Check Netflix stock ytd or for that matter Enron. Or the entire bank crisis of 2008. Is Bitcoin really deserving of this much attention?
- kelnos 4y ago
  > The internet has facilitated a staggering amount of crime as well as the fiat currencies of the globe. Sure, but both the internet and fiat currencies have facilitated a huge amount of legitimate activities, far, far more than crime. I would assert that the vast majority of users of Bitcoin (>90%) are either speculators or criminals (the vast majority of that majority being speculators, with some small but significant minority being criminals). > Let’s suppose this 14billion dollar number of Bitcoin crime is right [...] Global credit card fraud hit 32billion in 2021 Those numbers are meaningless without comparing them to the total monetary value of transactions pushed through them yearly. I suspect you'll find that, when talking about percent of total, Bitcoin fraud is higher than credit card fraud (and I would suspect that's still true if you consider other kinds of fraud in addition to CC fraud). > surely you aren’t suggesting Bitcoin is worthless and only provides a mechanism for crime. I'm not the person you're replying to, but I would suggest exactly that. The vast majority of Bitcoin use is either speculation or crime. And speculation basically destroys it as a stable store of value, which is something that's essential for a currency. Sure, there are people using it for legitimate purposes, or to get around unjust currency controls perpetrated by their governments. But I'd wager that's a tiny percentage of users, and they do so at great risk, both legally and financially. > As for investment risk. Check Netflix stock ytd or for that matter Enron. Or the entire bank crisis of 2008. Is Bitcoin really deserving of this much attention? Yes, absolutely. Your average person should not be investing in individual stocks. They should have the bulk of their investment assets in index funds, or at most, actively-managed funds. Regarding specific company stocks, sure, you can always cherry-pick examples that did worse than Bitcoin. That doesn't prove anything, though. Regardless, looking at the all-time history of BTC does not inspire confidence in it as an investment, especially were I to consider opening a position today.
stevenjgarner 4y ago
I'm not sure the "8 million adults — who made online payments to friends or family in other countries used at least one kind of cryptocurrency" would agree with you. [0] [0] https://www.pymnts.com/news/cross-border-commerce/cross-border-payments/2021/new-data-25-percent-united-states-cross-border-remittance-senders-use-cryptocurrency/ https://www.pymnts.com/news/cross-border-commerce/cross-bord...
- Fezzik 4y ago
  This woefully-lacking-of-legit-citations article says nothing like what you are asserting it says.
  - stevenjgarner 4y ago
    Umm ... that was an exact quote from the article.
    - kelnos 4y ago
      I think most people are rightfully skeptical of survey results where survey methodology is not disclosed.
      - stevenjgarner 4y ago
        Their disclosed survey methodology: "The Cross-Border Remittances Report, a PYMNTS and Stellar Development Foundation collaboration, draws from a census-balanced survey of 2,079 U.S. consumers who made cross-border peer-to-peer payments, conducted between June 23 and July 12, 2021. Respondents were an average of 39 years old, and 41 percent were female. Also, 47 percent held college degrees and 48 percent earned more than $100,000 in annual income." [0] [0] https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PYMNTS-Cross-Border-Remittances-Report-September-2021.pdf https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PYMNTS-Cro... (Page 25) EDIT: BTW I have absolutely no affiliation with either PYMNTS or the Stellar Development Foundation.
        4y ago
smsm42 4y ago
In 10 years for internet means the 1970s. At that time, vast majority of people had no idea such thing existed, and only a few of early researchers used it. For common people, adding value started around the early 90s, when the first commercial ISPs appeared. So, that's about 30 years of initial ramp-up. Let's see where the bitcoin will be in another 20 years. Noting that we already have commercial companies dealing with it - so if anything, the adoption is moving much faster.
ww520 4y ago
I do see one use of Bitcoin - harvesting energy in remote places where the electricity transmission cost is prohibitively high. Cheap energy in remote places that have no chance of transmitted out for normal usage is converted to value in Bitcoin.
- brians 4y ago
  Or we could just burn it. In what way is bitcoin more valuable than smoke?
  - ww520 4y ago
    Same way people dig up oil, sell it for cash, and put it in the bank.
- roland35 4y ago
  And why exactly does this need to happen? Especially if it is dirty coal or gas generation?
  - ww520 4y ago
    Why does it have to the coal or gas? Why not geothermal, solar, wind, or tidal wave?
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  That's predicated on the idea that bitcoin has other uses. Adding nodes to a linked list in the least efficient way possible to promote an mlm doesn't create any value.
Forge36 4y ago
The technology has promising applications. It's not clear that it's superior to existing alternatives (at least not enough that we're seeing many big moves to use it and publicize it's use). The Internet took 30+ years, granted "the start of the Internet" could be debated. Were we to do some word replacements Internet to radio, and Bitcoin to Internet your words would sound just as accurate following the dot-com bust. I do think we can agree some of the early decisions have led to disastrous consequences (proof of work power consumption is concerning high).
- im_down_w_otp 4y ago
  I mean... it's a ledger with an incremental attestation mechanism. It's a subset of a Merkle Tree. That's about it. There are some deeply technocratic applications for such a thing, such as: slightly better chain-of-custody tracking, identifying regions of large datasets that have been modified, etc. The idea was patented in 1979. That's how old it actually is, and it's found its way into numerous useful things. However, exactly zero of them have been as revolutionary or transformative as say the automobile or the internet and are about a million more orders of magnitude short of all the promises made by people using it as a means to burn electricity to sustain a marketplace addicted to financialization instead of actual productivity. Disclaimer: has dealt with Merkle Trees and cryptographic assurance in distributed database, global payments (root of trust & settlement), and safety-critical systems use cases.
dang 4y ago
> I keep saying this, but: Please don't do this. We want curious conversation, not repetitive talking points. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... I don't mean to pick on you personally—it's a serious problem with all threads on this topic.
- stillbourne 4y ago
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    I don't disagree with your points but dang is the super duper moderator. I don't think he's going back to 4chan or Reddit...
- hnthrow1010 4y ago
  I can't speak for the parent comment but I've had the same problem myself in discussing this. I would actually love to have to stop repeating myself, but the crypto CEOs keep also repeating the same marketing lines over and over again with reckless abandon and then a new group of people reads it and pops up the next day asking the same questions. Sometimes I can even directly map some comments to a series of tweets from a CEO just by searching and it's really frustrating. Dan, you should know this as well as anyone: it's easy for some startup to dump out unverified claims all over the internet. It takes continued and constant effort to refute those claims. So what can we do here? It feels like the amount of hype that's (still) happening is inherently not conducive to good discussion.
  - dang 4y ago
    If both sides are just repeating the same points, then there's no diff, and if there's no diff then it's off topic for this site. Diffs are what's interesting. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=diffs%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
upsidesinclude 4y ago
At roughly ~"10 years now" The dot com bubble burst shatterjng the 'internet' and the thousands of companies founded upon it. I can only imagine you held the same beliefs then as now
SergeAx 4y ago
I am not a big blockchain proponent, quite contrary. But you forgot the function of (more or less) unregulated money movement. It is used that way by laypeople from China, Russia, Iran and other authoritarian/sanctioned countries.
bobuk 4y ago
Internet (as ARPANET) has started at 1969. And before 1982 it wasn’t widely adopted. It’s pretty normal to be biased but fact checking is a must for this type of conversation. Internet “invented” а 1969 and never was used widely till 1982. Neural networks was developed at 1980 but real applications started at 2011. Speech recognition showed at 1962 and still looks like “pretty new piece of tech” for humanity. We have to admit, we are really slow in adopting tech.
Fnoord 4y ago
Given the post ends with: > And The Winner Is… > Chainalysis helps the government track down tax evasion,darknet markets and CSAM providers & consumers. This article agrees with you. It supports your argument. Because all of these dead projects have a vast amount of losers. People who invested in the cryptocurrency (as far as it ever was a currency), and who now own a useless pile of bits. The cherry on top is the main project which does make sense is one involving all the negative sides of cryptocurrencies in general, aiding law enforcement in their goal to combat crime involving cryptocurrencies.

yieldcrv 4y ago

DARPAnet did what in 10 years? Where we are now as still deciding whether the equivalent of TCP/IP will be what to move forward with, and by that metric I am pretty impressed with the progress of the blockchain concept and sentiment coordination.

Taek 4y ago

When the Internet was 10 years old the year was 1987.

hotpotamus 4y ago
But Al Gore didn't even take office until 1992.
- mulderc 4y ago
  Al Gore was first elected to congress in 1977.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- smsm42 4y ago
  That's why he had time to invent the internet! You can't do that while being busy with congressing and stuff.
dfabulich 4y ago
In 1987, Usenet and email were already pretty great. (And that was all before the web!)
- jsemrau 4y ago
  In early 1987 the number of hosts passes 10,000 [1] Space Quest - The Sarien Encounter was released in October 1986 [2] Only in 1989 Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom join the Internet. [1] https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/ https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Quest_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Quest_I
- acdha 4y ago
  Also things like FTP and telnet had many applications, too. My grandfather is an electrical engineer and he talked about how cool it was that the company he worked for got online in the 1980s because it allowed them to get things like Fortran compiler updates or numerical libraries without having to wait for them to be shipped on floppies. My uncle used online services for his food industry business, stock trading, etc. then too.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Also one year later IRC was invented. Killer app if ever there was one.
ChainOfFools 4y ago
Having heard this argument a nauseating number of times, it's fairly clear that people on both sides who say this use "the internet" when they mean "the web." So 1999 is a better "after 10 years'" benchmark here.
- plebianRube 4y ago
  Exactly, so then lightning is the better comparison, since it just a few years old and built on bitcoin, like the web was bult on tcp/ip.
- CodeShmode 4y ago
  The web was the killer app built on the infrastructure of the internet. The blockchain ecosystem is still building it's infrastructure.
  - westurner 4y ago
    # 1970s: The Internet (US Research Institutions, ARPA, IETF, IEEE,) TCP/IP, DNS (/etc/hosts), Routing Protocols for multiple DUN (Dial-Up Networking) links between schools, Gopher # The Web (TimBL (@CERN), IETF, W3C) HTTP, HTML: "Hyperlinks" between "Hypertext" documents; edges with "anchor text" types. [No-crypto P2P] # Web 2.0 (CoC Web Frameworks, AJAX, open source SQL, LAMP,) Interactive HTML with user-contributed-content to moderate # ~~Web 3.0~~ (W3C,) Linked Data; RDF, RDFa 5-Star Linked Data: https://5stardata.info/ https://5stardata.info/ - Use URIs in your datasets; e.g. describe the columns of the CSVs with URIs: CSVW # Web3 ("Zero-Trust") SK: Secret Key PK: Public Key Crypto P2P: resilient distributed system application architectures with no points of failure ENS (Ethereum Name Service) instead of DNS. ENS binds unique strings to accounts; just like NFTs. (A non-fungible-token is a like a coin where each bill has a unique serial number. A fungible-token is a thing that there are transactable fractions of that needn't have unique identities: US coinage, barrels of oil, ounces of gold/silver. Non-fungible tokens are indivisible: you can't tear a bill in half because there's only the one serial number (and that's actually a federal crime in the USA, to deface money). Similarly, ENS entries - which map a string to an account id (hash of a public key) - can't be split into fractions and sold, so they're Non-FTs; NFTs) (DNS is somewhat unfixably broken due to the permissiveness necessary to interact with non-DNSSEC-compliant domains resulting in downgrade attack risks: even with e.g. DNS-over-TLS, DNS-over-HTTPS, or DNS-over-QUIC securing the channel; if the DNS client does not reject DNS responses that do not have DNSSEC signatures, a DNS MITM will succeed. If you deny access to DNSSEC-unsigned domains at your DNS client config or the (maybe forwarding) DNS resolver on the router, what is the error message in the browser?)
halostatue 4y ago
…and it was clearly adding value all over the place. It wasn’t on the growth curve post-1992, but its value for technology companies and universities was not even a question.
- Taek 4y ago
  People will look back at 2020 Blockchain and say it was also adding value all over the place. Decentralized storage exists, decentralized DNS exists, NFTs exist, remittances exist, and so on. Is the value marginal next to what the web does today? Sure. But its more than enough value for people 50 years from now to get rose tinted glasses around, as many are doing in this thread concerning the early internet
  - halostatue 4y ago
    People will look back at 2020 Blockchain and either say (a) crap, how did we ever get taken in by that, or (b) boy, howdy, do you remember how foolish those people were that thought this stuff was anything but a scam? There is nothing that can be done on blockchain that cannot be done cheaper, faster, easier, and more securely without blockchain. Blockchain has negative value, and no matter where you measure the start of the Internet from, it had more positive externalities fourteen years on than anything blockchain will ever have, not least because so-called "blockchain" has an insurmountable set of negative externalities that would need to be overcome if a single real-world productive use could be found for it.
smsm42 4y ago
What event you are counting from? The term "internet" was first used in 1974 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc675 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc675) AFAIK, but the technology has been in development since 1960s.

chrisabrams 4y ago

What country do you live in? Because I know plenty of folks in certain countries with massive inflation and projects such as bitcoin are their refuge from 100-1000% inflation a year. When you say “in 10 years” when did that 10 year time frame start and end? Are talking about the 1960s or the 1990s? Because most people I knew didn’t start using the internet regularly until the mid to late 90s or about 30 or so years after it’s inception. 10 years is still pretty early in terms of adoption. I know people who still have never used email…

readams 4y ago
There are a lot of much better assets to buy as an inflation hedge.
- toolz 4y ago
  If you live in a wealthy country, yes, but if you have limited bank access and consequently likely a country with unstable fiat, which assets would you suggest are more stable for long term holding? Certainly not physical assets, as people without banking access aren't likely to have vaults or some way to protect something like gold.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    Usually in stone (buildings/sheds), farmland, or readily usable goods that keep well/provide value (rice, dry beans, generator, fridge). Sucks if you need to run though. But usually if you're wealthy in an unwealthy/poorly banked country and can't leave for some reason, you keep your assets in the place you'd run to if you really had to.
    - toolz 4y ago
      all of those things are fine and good, but they aren't something you can easily put your savings into - you have to save up to buy most of that stuff, and you can't just horde physical items without necessary storage and protection. Further for some people these things all pose substantially more risk than bitcoin. If someone burns your sheds down or salts your farmland because you can't payoff the local rebels, you risk losing everything, with bitcoin, having poor timing on exiting the market is risky, but certainly not 100% wealth loss risk and that's without even considering the aspect that memorizing a wallets secret phrase is the only upkeep you need to hold bitcoin. All of those physical assets bear some form of time/energy to maintain/upkeep and as you mention have a strong downside of making you immobile. I'm not saying everyone should store their savings in bitcoin, but I am saying it serves a very real, potentially life changing purpose for some people and that shouldn't be discounted.

cowtools 4y ago

The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has. If there was a "super-centralized" network that already had major success (for example, imagine a world in which teletext or something was dominant before the internet) then the internet/web may have had a serious competitor. Instead, the internet was largely reverse-compatible with previous networks such as the phone network through dial-up. Additionally, the latest wave of cryptocurrency hucksters have been selling their cryptocurrencies as a solution for a problem that cryptocurrency just does not solve. It is one thing to claim that they're wrong; it's another to claim that cryptocurrency has failed its original purpose entirely.

crazygringo 4y ago
Of course it had to. There were absolutely successful networks. AOL (America Online) was the biggest, while CompuServe was the older one. I remember (alas) consciously choosing not to invest in .com domain names in the mid-90's because I assumed both they and AOL room names (if that was the term?) would just be passing fads on the way to whatever better newer network would exist ten years later, with a newer name system. The internet absolutely had to overcome America Online, at least in the US. (It helped that, early on, many/most people could access the internet via AOL, before local ISP's became widespread.)
hnthrow1010 4y ago
>The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has. This line of thinking is extremely dangerous, even moreso for something that's claiming to be a currency. This is the mentality that lead to these ponzi-like schemes; the promoters are prioritizing growth at all costs for the sole purpose of overcoming the network effects. Not because they actually built decent products.
cmsj 4y ago
> The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has. It's hard to imagine how one could define the growth of the Internet as anything other than network effects - its value to end users has always been a function of how many end users there are, which is literally the definition of a network effect. Edit: To expand a little, considering I don't know if you were aware of the early/mid 1990s, but in those days most people didn't have a computer at home, and in many places phone calls were charged per-minute. It was a significant thing to buy a PC and learn how to use it and pay a lot to go online.

rvz 4y ago

> Bitcoin is well over 10 years old by now. So after 10 years, is Bitcoin the only one though? > In 10 years, the internet was already clearly adding a ton of value all over the place. The Internet? In the 1980s there were virtually little to no users. Until the Web came around in the 1990s so did the dotcom speculators and then after the crash, 90% of those internet startups died. Only then the survivors added value to it. Even Web 2.0 was seen as a 'scam' [0]. I'm sure you meant the web? [0] https://www.wired.com/2005/10/web-2-0-cracks-start-to-show/ https://www.wired.com/2005/10/web-2-0-cracks-start-to-show/

victorvosk 4y ago

I agree except "an staggering amount of crime". This has been studied a lot and there is no clear evidence of more crime than normal occurring just because of bitcoin

ghostpepper 4y ago
Bitcoin has made it drastically easier to monetize a system once it’s been compromised
justinator 4y ago
Sounds pretty staggering, Two Arrested for Alleged Conspiracy to Launder $4.5 Billion in Stolen Cryptocurrency https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-alleged-conspiracy-launder-45-billion-stolen-cryptocurrency https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-arrested-alleged-conspira...
MBCook 4y ago
Why did ransomware explode after Bitcoin came along? Why is it (and Eth) the payment method everyone asks for? Because it’s far far easier to use for ransomware and to hide your trail than any traditional bank transaction or money transfer.
- tremarley 4y ago
  Ransoms have been paid via Bank Wires, PayPal and other technologies for decades. 99% of internet based ransoms are still being paid via Bank Wires.
  - hollerith 4y ago
    What evidence do you have for, "99% of internet based ransoms are being paid via Bank Wires"? That would be decisive if it were true. But I always thought that it is much easier to get ill-gotten gains out of BTC than out of the banking system.

jonas21 4y ago

I'm as skeptical of Bitcoin as anyone, but this is not a very good argument. You'd come to the same conclusion if you evaluated the state of aviation in 1900 or photography in 1820. Even the Internet was useless to the average person in 1982 (13 years in).

rossdavidh 4y ago
None of those cases, however, had anywhere near as much money put into them that early. It may be that, if blockchain technologies had grown in size much, much slower, that good uses would have been found. Regardless, once this much real money (and the resources of electricity, labor, technical expertise, etc. that they represent) have been invested into something, something impressive should have resulted by now.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- __ryan__ 4y ago
  How much of that money was based on capitalizing on an unregulated speculative investment market? Just because a lot of resources flow in the general direction of a technology doesn’t mean it wasn’t put to misguided use.
  - rossdavidh 4y ago
    Oh, absolutely. I do think, however, that the very nature of trying to make a new currency (the first and still primary use case for blockchain) is almost inevitably going to have this problem.
bb88 4y ago
Humans are pretty efficient at screwing each other over, particularly when money is involved. And any technology that allows humans to screw each other over more efficiently should have the deepest skepticism possible. https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ has tracked $10B in losses due to grift. And that doesn't include the losses used to pay off ransomware. Money laundering for good is still money laundering.

Keyb0ardWarr10r 4y ago

> only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies Did you miss 2008, shitty CDOs? > and an staggering amount of crime How has BTC enabled crime more than cash?

MBCook 4y ago
It’s very hard to ransom a US hospital or school district from Eastern Europe (or wherever) and get paid in cash. It’s trivial to be paid in BTC.

social_quotient 4y ago

It’s interesting giving attribution of crime to Bitcoin and not the internet or hackers. The internet has facilitated a staggering amount of crime as well as the fiat currencies of the globe. Let’s suppose this 14billion dollar number of Bitcoin crime is right … https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/01/06/crypto-crime-hit-an-all-time-high-of-14b-in-2021-as-prices-climbed-chainalysis/ https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/01/06/crypto-crime-hit-an... Global credit card fraud hit 32billion in 2021 - https://chargebacks911.com/credit-card-fraud-statistics/ https://chargebacks911.com/credit-card-fraud-statistics/ And that’s just credit cards. It’s not wire fraud or other fraud. Why do you focus on the mode of criminality and not the crime or criminals itself? I’ll give you that Bitcoin like ALL the other value transfer mechanisms has some criminals using it but surely you aren’t suggesting Bitcoin is worthless and only provides a mechanism for crime. As for investment risk. Check Netflix stock ytd or for that matter Enron. Or the entire bank crisis of 2008. Is Bitcoin really deserving of this much attention?

kelnos 4y ago
> The internet has facilitated a staggering amount of crime as well as the fiat currencies of the globe. Sure, but both the internet and fiat currencies have facilitated a huge amount of legitimate activities, far, far more than crime. I would assert that the vast majority of users of Bitcoin (>90%) are either speculators or criminals (the vast majority of that majority being speculators, with some small but significant minority being criminals). > Let’s suppose this 14billion dollar number of Bitcoin crime is right [...] Global credit card fraud hit 32billion in 2021 Those numbers are meaningless without comparing them to the total monetary value of transactions pushed through them yearly. I suspect you'll find that, when talking about percent of total, Bitcoin fraud is higher than credit card fraud (and I would suspect that's still true if you consider other kinds of fraud in addition to CC fraud). > surely you aren’t suggesting Bitcoin is worthless and only provides a mechanism for crime. I'm not the person you're replying to, but I would suggest exactly that. The vast majority of Bitcoin use is either speculation or crime. And speculation basically destroys it as a stable store of value, which is something that's essential for a currency. Sure, there are people using it for legitimate purposes, or to get around unjust currency controls perpetrated by their governments. But I'd wager that's a tiny percentage of users, and they do so at great risk, both legally and financially. > As for investment risk. Check Netflix stock ytd or for that matter Enron. Or the entire bank crisis of 2008. Is Bitcoin really deserving of this much attention? Yes, absolutely. Your average person should not be investing in individual stocks. They should have the bulk of their investment assets in index funds, or at most, actively-managed funds. Regarding specific company stocks, sure, you can always cherry-pick examples that did worse than Bitcoin. That doesn't prove anything, though. Regardless, looking at the all-time history of BTC does not inspire confidence in it as an investment, especially were I to consider opening a position today.

stevenjgarner 4y ago

I'm not sure the "8 million adults — who made online payments to friends or family in other countries used at least one kind of cryptocurrency" would agree with you. [0] [0] https://www.pymnts.com/news/cross-border-commerce/cross-border-payments/2021/new-data-25-percent-united-states-cross-border-remittance-senders-use-cryptocurrency/ https://www.pymnts.com/news/cross-border-commerce/cross-bord...

Fezzik 4y ago
This woefully-lacking-of-legit-citations article says nothing like what you are asserting it says.
- stevenjgarner 4y ago
  Umm ... that was an exact quote from the article.
  - kelnos 4y ago
    I think most people are rightfully skeptical of survey results where survey methodology is not disclosed.
    - stevenjgarner 4y ago
      Their disclosed survey methodology: "The Cross-Border Remittances Report, a PYMNTS and Stellar Development Foundation collaboration, draws from a census-balanced survey of 2,079 U.S. consumers who made cross-border peer-to-peer payments, conducted between June 23 and July 12, 2021. Respondents were an average of 39 years old, and 41 percent were female. Also, 47 percent held college degrees and 48 percent earned more than $100,000 in annual income." [0] [0] https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PYMNTS-Cross-Border-Remittances-Report-September-2021.pdf https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PYMNTS-Cro... (Page 25) EDIT: BTW I have absolutely no affiliation with either PYMNTS or the Stellar Development Foundation.
      - 4y ago

smsm42 4y ago

In 10 years for internet means the 1970s. At that time, vast majority of people had no idea such thing existed, and only a few of early researchers used it. For common people, adding value started around the early 90s, when the first commercial ISPs appeared. So, that's about 30 years of initial ramp-up. Let's see where the bitcoin will be in another 20 years. Noting that we already have commercial companies dealing with it - so if anything, the adoption is moving much faster.

ww520 4y ago

I do see one use of Bitcoin - harvesting energy in remote places where the electricity transmission cost is prohibitively high. Cheap energy in remote places that have no chance of transmitted out for normal usage is converted to value in Bitcoin.

brians 4y ago
Or we could just burn it. In what way is bitcoin more valuable than smoke?
- ww520 4y ago
  Same way people dig up oil, sell it for cash, and put it in the bank.
roland35 4y ago
And why exactly does this need to happen? Especially if it is dirty coal or gas generation?
- ww520 4y ago
  Why does it have to the coal or gas? Why not geothermal, solar, wind, or tidal wave?
Schroedingersat 4y ago
That's predicated on the idea that bitcoin has other uses. Adding nodes to a linked list in the least efficient way possible to promote an mlm doesn't create any value.

Forge36 4y ago

The technology has promising applications. It's not clear that it's superior to existing alternatives (at least not enough that we're seeing many big moves to use it and publicize it's use). The Internet took 30+ years, granted "the start of the Internet" could be debated. Were we to do some word replacements Internet to radio, and Bitcoin to Internet your words would sound just as accurate following the dot-com bust. I do think we can agree some of the early decisions have led to disastrous consequences (proof of work power consumption is concerning high).

im_down_w_otp 4y ago
I mean... it's a ledger with an incremental attestation mechanism. It's a subset of a Merkle Tree. That's about it. There are some deeply technocratic applications for such a thing, such as: slightly better chain-of-custody tracking, identifying regions of large datasets that have been modified, etc. The idea was patented in 1979. That's how old it actually is, and it's found its way into numerous useful things. However, exactly zero of them have been as revolutionary or transformative as say the automobile or the internet and are about a million more orders of magnitude short of all the promises made by people using it as a means to burn electricity to sustain a marketplace addicted to financialization instead of actual productivity. Disclaimer: has dealt with Merkle Trees and cryptographic assurance in distributed database, global payments (root of trust & settlement), and safety-critical systems use cases.

dang 4y ago

> I keep saying this, but: Please don't do this. We want curious conversation, not repetitive talking points. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... I don't mean to pick on you personally—it's a serious problem with all threads on this topic.

stillbourne 4y ago
- giantrobot 4y ago
  I don't disagree with your points but dang is the super duper moderator. I don't think he's going back to 4chan or Reddit...
hnthrow1010 4y ago
I can't speak for the parent comment but I've had the same problem myself in discussing this. I would actually love to have to stop repeating myself, but the crypto CEOs keep also repeating the same marketing lines over and over again with reckless abandon and then a new group of people reads it and pops up the next day asking the same questions. Sometimes I can even directly map some comments to a series of tweets from a CEO just by searching and it's really frustrating. Dan, you should know this as well as anyone: it's easy for some startup to dump out unverified claims all over the internet. It takes continued and constant effort to refute those claims. So what can we do here? It feels like the amount of hype that's (still) happening is inherently not conducive to good discussion.
- dang 4y ago
  If both sides are just repeating the same points, then there's no diff, and if there's no diff then it's off topic for this site. Diffs are what's interesting. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=diffs%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

upsidesinclude 4y ago

At roughly ~"10 years now" The dot com bubble burst shatterjng the 'internet' and the thousands of companies founded upon it. I can only imagine you held the same beliefs then as now

SergeAx 4y ago

I am not a big blockchain proponent, quite contrary. But you forgot the function of (more or less) unregulated money movement. It is used that way by laypeople from China, Russia, Iran and other authoritarian/sanctioned countries.

bobuk 4y ago

Internet (as ARPANET) has started at 1969. And before 1982 it wasn’t widely adopted. It’s pretty normal to be biased but fact checking is a must for this type of conversation. Internet “invented” а 1969 and never was used widely till 1982. Neural networks was developed at 1980 but real applications started at 2011. Speech recognition showed at 1962 and still looks like “pretty new piece of tech” for humanity. We have to admit, we are really slow in adopting tech.

Fnoord 4y ago

Given the post ends with: > And The Winner Is… > Chainalysis helps the government track down tax evasion,darknet markets and CSAM providers & consumers. This article agrees with you. It supports your argument. Because all of these dead projects have a vast amount of losers. People who invested in the cryptocurrency (as far as it ever was a currency), and who now own a useless pile of bits. The cherry on top is the main project which does make sense is one involving all the negative sides of cryptocurrencies in general, aiding law enforcement in their goal to combat crime involving cryptocurrencies.