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Social changes take longer than technical changes, and social changes to how people collaborate with strangers and invest their livelihoods take much longer tha

Social changes take longer than technical changes, and social changes to how people collaborate with strangers and invest their livelihoods take much longer than changes to how they spend their leisure time. If you try out a website and don't like it, you've invested a couple minutes of your time and can back out without any major consequences. If you invest years of your life in a venture and then lose all the rewards of that because you forgot your seed phrase, well, you'll be a little more reticent to adopt that technology. Crypto is fundamentally a technology that allows trade and collaboration between people who mutually distrust each other. If you trust the other person to settle up, just use a database or a credit card (it's right there in the word "credit"). It follows that early adoption is going to happen in areas where people mutually distrust each other and can't rely on traditional methods of dispute arbitration (i.e. the state and the legal system), either because they're doing something the state doesn't approve of, or the state is not viable where they are. Most of HN does not fit into this demographic. We're usually in high-trust social groups (eg. white-collar work) in a high-trust nation (eg. the United States). So it'd be completely mysterious what use-case crypto would ever serve. But the trend worldwide since 2009 has been generally lower levels of trust and weaker, more insecure, and more heavy-handed state institutions. In 50 years we may all look like Venezuela. A lot of people think "I'd rather be dead than live in a world where people don't trust each other", and they will probably get their wish. But for survivors, it's very useful to have a way to trade with people who probably don't have your best interests at heart. Come to think of it, cryptocurrency is a fundamentally pessimistic technology, and perhaps the reason it inspires so much vitriol is that people don't like to think about negative things like the collapse of society happening.

kkielhofner 3y ago
> Social changes take longer than technical changes, and social changes to how people collaborate with strangers and invest their livelihoods take much longer than changes to how they spend their leisure time. If you try out a website and don't like it, you've invested a couple minutes of your time and can back out without any major consequences. If you invest years of your life in a venture and then lose all the rewards of that because you forgot your seed phrase, well, you'll be a little more reticent to adopt that technology. Yet the web exploded in use and changed almost every aspect of society inside of a decade - connecting strangers around the world with no inherent trust mechanism. Look at my "grandma on eBay" for example. I remember the days of "Well, I'm going to send this person a money order. I hope I get my stuff". Or "ok, I'm putting my credit card number in this random webpage, let's see what happens..." Lack of trust is not a new thing and for successful platforms and changes it hasn't slowed down adoption much. I understand the rest of your position even less. In the event of the complete collapse of society your bitcoin (on the internet that no longer functions, depending on electricity that doesn't exist) is even less useful than paper money with a dead president on it. At least you can burn that for warmth, cooking, etc... When faced with using scare electricity for survival or mining to run the bitcoin network I assure you no one is going to waste extremely precious watts on that. Speaking of situations no one wants to think about, in this scenario the only thing that will win and ensure survival is force - weapons. This is an area where the "preppers" hoarding ammunition are somehow more rational and logical than the crypto community - and that's really saying something. If you are even entertaining such a scenario a couple of thousands of dollars for guns and ammunition is an infinitely better investment than crypto.

kkielhofner 3y ago

> Social changes take longer than technical changes, and social changes to how people collaborate with strangers and invest their livelihoods take much longer than changes to how they spend their leisure time. If you try out a website and don't like it, you've invested a couple minutes of your time and can back out without any major consequences. If you invest years of your life in a venture and then lose all the rewards of that because you forgot your seed phrase, well, you'll be a little more reticent to adopt that technology. Yet the web exploded in use and changed almost every aspect of society inside of a decade - connecting strangers around the world with no inherent trust mechanism. Look at my "grandma on eBay" for example. I remember the days of "Well, I'm going to send this person a money order. I hope I get my stuff". Or "ok, I'm putting my credit card number in this random webpage, let's see what happens..." Lack of trust is not a new thing and for successful platforms and changes it hasn't slowed down adoption much. I understand the rest of your position even less. In the event of the complete collapse of society your bitcoin (on the internet that no longer functions, depending on electricity that doesn't exist) is even less useful than paper money with a dead president on it. At least you can burn that for warmth, cooking, etc... When faced with using scare electricity for survival or mining to run the bitcoin network I assure you no one is going to waste extremely precious watts on that. Speaking of situations no one wants to think about, in this scenario the only thing that will win and ensure survival is force - weapons. This is an area where the "preppers" hoarding ammunition are somehow more rational and logical than the crypto community - and that's really saying something. If you are even entertaining such a scenario a couple of thousands of dollars for guns and ammunition is an infinitely better investment than crypto.