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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 u
by 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 agoI 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.