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15 years is early days when the technology is completely novel. For reference: the internet started in 1969. It took 30 years for it to see mass adoption. Ethe

15 years is early days when the technology is completely novel. For reference: the internet started in 1969. It took 30 years for it to see mass adoption. Ethereum is extremely primitive at the moment. You reveal your address, and all of your transactions, to the entire world, when you use it. Scalability of L1 is limited to 30 transactions per second, while L2 is still in beta, with centralized coordinators. With more development, people can conduct transactions while maintaining total privacy, and the public blockchain can, with the use of temporary data layers (EIP-4444 in Ethereum), sharding and Rollups, process 100,000 transactions per second while maintaining the decentralization, tamper-resistance and permissionless-ness characteristic of blockchains.

colesantiago 4y ago
Yet most modern AI tools and any modern technology took a shorter time to reach critical mass. We are not in the 1960's anymore, 15 years for something that was made in 2008 and isn't used for its intended use case is not early days at all. It is a failure.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  AI has been in development for decades. Practical artificial neural networks have been in development for 40 years.
- Ar-Curunir 4y ago
  AI, a field that’s almost as old as computer science?
  - LamaOfRuin 4y ago
    cryptography, a field that's so old that evidence of its start is lost to time, but at least 3900 years.
    - Ar-Curunir 4y ago
      As a cryptographer, I can confidently tell you that cryptography the science only became a thing in the early 80s. The caesar cipher is irrelevant to modern day crypto.
acdha 4y ago
The difference is that the internet was immediately useful to people whose jobs weren’t selling it, and adoption was held back by severe constraints (computers and networks were slow, limited, and very expensive) until the mid-90s. Despite that, the web started changing the world within a couple years of the first release. Ethereum’s had more time where it’s had global availability at much lower prices but it’s hard far less impact because it doesn’t solve problems almost any people have.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  Ethereum is a financial platform, so its uses are going to be different than the internet's. So far, it has been used by the Ukrainian government to do fundraising: https://futurism.com/the-byte/ukraine-selling-nft-military https://futurism.com/the-byte/ukraine-selling-nft-military And to buy weapons/medical-supplies: https://twitter.com/nicksvyaznoy/status/1605248783192887298 https://twitter.com/nicksvyaznoy/status/1605248783192887298 It's used by artists to make a living: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/this-36-year-old-made-over-109000-in-about-9-months-selling-nfts.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/this-36-year-old-made-over-1... And it's used to transact with over a hundred billion dollars worth of stablecoins, in countries like Argentina where the currency is unreliable: https://cryptonews.com/news/stablecoins-lead-charge-as-crypto-buying-accelerates-argentina.htm https://cryptonews.com/news/stablecoins-lead-charge-as-crypt... And this is when it's in a primitive state, with very limited scalability, and zero privacy. Once the technology is more developed, to allow something substantially greater than 30 transactions to be processed per second, and to allow people to conduct transactions on the blockchain without revealing their financial assets and activity to the world, it will likely gain more adoption, especially in the realm of stablecoins.
  - acdha 4y ago
    Yes, I’m aware there’s been some niche usage but it’s still quite limited because it doesn’t outperform the alternatives on almost any task - yes, it’s cool that Ukraine gets so money but it’s a tiny fraction of the total. The real question is how much margin you can save: anyone can transfer money, the question is whether you’re cheaper, safer, etc. If the pitch is “like PayPal but 10% cheaper” that really caps the total growth potential. Similarly, the privacy things are both a huge change and something only needed due to having built the system on the wrong architecture. Solving that problem means very expensively reaching the point where its competitors started.

colesantiago 4y ago

Yet most modern AI tools and any modern technology took a shorter time to reach critical mass. We are not in the 1960's anymore, 15 years for something that was made in 2008 and isn't used for its intended use case is not early days at all. It is a failure.

ETH_start 4y ago
AI has been in development for decades. Practical artificial neural networks have been in development for 40 years.
Ar-Curunir 4y ago
AI, a field that’s almost as old as computer science?
- LamaOfRuin 4y ago
  cryptography, a field that's so old that evidence of its start is lost to time, but at least 3900 years.
  - Ar-Curunir 4y ago
    As a cryptographer, I can confidently tell you that cryptography the science only became a thing in the early 80s. The caesar cipher is irrelevant to modern day crypto.

acdha 4y ago

The difference is that the internet was immediately useful to people whose jobs weren’t selling it, and adoption was held back by severe constraints (computers and networks were slow, limited, and very expensive) until the mid-90s. Despite that, the web started changing the world within a couple years of the first release. Ethereum’s had more time where it’s had global availability at much lower prices but it’s hard far less impact because it doesn’t solve problems almost any people have.

ETH_start 4y ago
Ethereum is a financial platform, so its uses are going to be different than the internet's. So far, it has been used by the Ukrainian government to do fundraising: https://futurism.com/the-byte/ukraine-selling-nft-military https://futurism.com/the-byte/ukraine-selling-nft-military And to buy weapons/medical-supplies: https://twitter.com/nicksvyaznoy/status/1605248783192887298 https://twitter.com/nicksvyaznoy/status/1605248783192887298 It's used by artists to make a living: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/this-36-year-old-made-over-109000-in-about-9-months-selling-nfts.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/this-36-year-old-made-over-1... And it's used to transact with over a hundred billion dollars worth of stablecoins, in countries like Argentina where the currency is unreliable: https://cryptonews.com/news/stablecoins-lead-charge-as-crypto-buying-accelerates-argentina.htm https://cryptonews.com/news/stablecoins-lead-charge-as-crypt... And this is when it's in a primitive state, with very limited scalability, and zero privacy. Once the technology is more developed, to allow something substantially greater than 30 transactions to be processed per second, and to allow people to conduct transactions on the blockchain without revealing their financial assets and activity to the world, it will likely gain more adoption, especially in the realm of stablecoins.
- acdha 4y ago
  Yes, I’m aware there’s been some niche usage but it’s still quite limited because it doesn’t outperform the alternatives on almost any task - yes, it’s cool that Ukraine gets so money but it’s a tiny fraction of the total. The real question is how much margin you can save: anyone can transfer money, the question is whether you’re cheaper, safer, etc. If the pitch is “like PayPal but 10% cheaper” that really caps the total growth potential. Similarly, the privacy things are both a huge change and something only needed due to having built the system on the wrong architecture. Solving that problem means very expensively reaching the point where its competitors started.