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> blockchain has had plenty of time, audience, etc for widespread adoption Blockchains have been in a dial-up era. Bitcoin only supports balance transfers and
by everfree 4y ago
> blockchain has had plenty of time, audience, etc for widespread adoption
Blockchains have been in a dial-up era. Bitcoin only supports balance transfers and has a hard-coded throughput limit of 1 Megabyte every 10 minutes (1990s modem speeds), and that effectively represented the state of the art of blockchain technology for 6 years. Until 2015, you couldn't even run a simple script on a blockchain (I don't count Bitcoin's extremely limited stack-based language).
The official 1983 birthday of the internet is very much analogous to the 2009 birthday of the blockchain. It was the "spark moment" where the tech was there but extremely limited, and thereafter was a long "dead period" where it didn't do much for a long time as it waited for the world to catch on. Then 10 years later in 1993, the underlying internet technology saw its first really useful framework built on top, the web. 7 years later in 2015, the underlying blockchain technology saw its first really useful framework built on top, a turing-complete programming language. It would take the web another 20 years until the 2000s to build its first true killer apps, and I predict that blockchain's true killer apps (e.g. an Uber killer) won't be seen until the late 2020s to early 2030s.
> Arguably until AOL it was also extremely expensive. When I got on the internet it was with an inflation adjusted $5000 computer, per minute long distance toll charges, and paying an ISP (also by the minute).
Until layer-2 technologies (conceived ~2017 and still maturing), blockchains were also extremely expensive, peaking at tens of dollars for a simple transaction or hundreds for a more complex one. When I first interacted with a blockchain it was through a heavy client that downloaded tens of gigabytes of data to my computer, extremely low network bandwidth for transactions, zero hardware support for key management, one shady exchange that required international money transfers, and effectively zero support for publishing code on the blockchain. That's all changed now.
> For the entirety of the existence of blockchain we've had ubiquitous broadband, social media, smartphones with always available data, etc. The conditions for the first 14 years of the web were vastly different and disadvantaged compared to the last 14 years in which blockchain has had plenty of time, audience, etc for widespread adoption and yet it still hasn't happened.
The internet was a technology built on the progression of hardware and software tech; blockchains are built much more on progression of software tech. Blockchains as a framework need to get good enough to be able to support killer apps; they are not good enough today, but they are in intensive development along straightforward roadmaps to alleviate a lot of the pain points.
- danny_codes 4y agoName one app that would be killer.
- everfree 4y agoPublic auditing software that transparently shows how government or charity funds are being spent in real time - from the incoming tax proceeds, through each agency and department, down to (when appropriate) every individual purchase, with each transaction digitally signed by a person who could be held accountable.
- kkielhofner 4y agoIf you are comparing the state of the internet in 1983 (calling it the "big bang" because TCP/IP was standardized!!!) and equating it to the release of a software client that could be downloaded and run in 2009 I'm not sure that we can have a rational debate on this. The US Census didn't even track /access to a computer/ until 1984[0], at which point roughly 18% of the US population had "access" to a computer either at home or at work. Note that "access to a computer" != access to the internet. At the end of 1985 there were 2,000 total hosts on the internet[1]. You can't even find internet usage statistics until the early-mid 1990s at best because it was almost exclusively a tiny network of government and academia. If you are comparing blockchain transaction costs peaking at tens or hundreds of dollars to a minimum several thousand dollar investment and (at least for me) internet access prices of roughly $3 per minute[2] as late as 1994 I'm not sure that we can have a rational debate on this. If we are comparing technical complexity I'll take early blockchain over serial ports, Hayes commands, CHAT scripts, PPP/SLIP, installing your own TCP/IP stack, etc any day of the week. Note that if you were doing any of this in the 1980s/1990s you were either stumbling through it or flipping through pages in a book. For any technical challenges of blockchain it's always been a Google search away. If you are comparing the state of software development from 2009 - 2015/2017 to the first 10 years of the internet I'm not sure we can have a rational debate on this. Needless to say because of the maturity and ubiquity of the internet and the software ecosystem, etc and the efficiencies it enabled by 2009 the situation each of these technologies matured in cannot even be compared. If we're being extremely generous the five years (from 2017 - present) and tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars that have been invested in blockchain is more than enough for some kind of application or use case to have emerged to trigger mass adoption. Yet here we are with a tiny fraction (1% at best) of the five billion people on the internet having anything to do with blockchain. [0] - https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/computerusage1984.pdf https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/computerusage1984.pdf [1] - https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/ https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/ [2] - https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-State_Link/IAD/ref97.pdf https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FC...