5 ms·

What’s so comical about this is that common-standard digital-first micropayments is THE use case pitch for cryptocurrencies. They had a… decade-and-a-half head

What’s so comical about this is that common-standard digital-first micropayments is THE use case pitch for cryptocurrencies. They had a… decade-and-a-half head start (?) and didn’t make that work beyond a random array of digital tokens too expensive to purchase anything with, managed via many easily-forged browser extensions.

nwienert 3y ago
ML existed since the middle of the last century but has only really found its legs as of late, but I didn’t see a lot of people make fun of it for not being perfect within a decade.
- graypegg 3y ago
  Fair point, but machine learning has also been creating value thru all of that time. There were products that used machine learning in the late 90s for many things. DeepBlue! I think you’re thinking of LLMs which only became possible with the shear amount of conversational data we have today. They obviously share a linage with ML, but it’s a form of training that was impossible several years prior. You can’t say that IBM DeepBlue was an early LLM and measure the timelines like that. If you know of any watershed moment for crypto that needs to happen, I would love to hear it! I just don’t see anything happening on the horizon.
  - nwienert 3y ago
    I’ve been getting and continue to get value from crypto for a multitude of uses. There’s tons of people using it actively, so I just wonder why you choose to ignore that. A lot more than the very marginal value ML did for its first decades of existence. DeepBlue came many decades after the field came into being. And I’m very aware of LLM and the different types of ML. It still stands that it was very marginal for decades. But it would be easy to write some dismissive comment in the 80s that the only thing it’s done is play chess for millions of dollars - exactly like crypto haters do today despite it being a completely nascent field.
    - graypegg 3y ago
      Fair! I know there’s lots of wallet activity on any of the big chains right now. I’m a little suspicious of that representing real economic activity (filling the role of a currency, used as units of exchange) and maybe a bit more convinced it’s a casino poker chip ledger. It seems like the simple majority of people trade and transact out of their exchange, to my knowledge. If that simile of ML is like crypto is true, you stand to be quite rich! So best of luck! Best comments have net 0 right, so hopefully you’ll think of me and this thread when you’re a trillionaire eh? ;)
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      ML was not marginal for decades. It's been in regular use in a number of fields for decades. The current hype is an artifact of someone putting fun interface in front of an ML system. Hype around generative imagery and LLMs is new, not the technologies themselves. Crypto has been around for nearly a decade and a half and has been really useful for malware and scammers and not much else. It's fundamentally broken as a currency because most coins are designed to be deflationary so they behave like securities. It's fundamentally broken for micro transactions because transactions are ridiculously expensive and slow by design.
  - mattdesl 3y ago
    AI and machine learning has had several decades to mature—and it had multiple “winters” where interest and funding waned. It’s possible in 60 years we might see similar leaps from distributed ledgers, zero knowledge proofs, verifiable computation, fully homomorphic encryption, and other tech being spearheaded by the crypto sector.
    - graypegg 3y ago
      It’s always possible! I’m no fortune teller. Many people have been wrong and maybe one day I’ll be laughing at my naivety. But for my own projects for the foreseeable future as measured right now, I’ll avoid. I just don’t see it becoming more than poker chips at your exchange of choice.
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      None of those things were invented or really developed by the "crypto sector" merely utilized by it. That's not a bad thing but it's disingenuous the crypto sector is really advancing any state of the art. It's implementing existing technologies mostly to facilitate scams and tax evasion.
      - mattdesl 3y ago
        All of these are primarily being funded and advanced by crypto. “Distributed ledger technology” hardly existed before blockchains/Bitcoin. Similar story with ZKP, which has gone from academic theory to real-world application (see: ZKSNARK) in the last decade primarily from blockchain research and funding streams.
        graypegg 3y ago
        Aren’t zero knowledge proofs cryptographic signatures? I might be missing something, but that’s very much been in active use as part of any flavour RSA cryptography going back decades. Distributed ledger technology, though yes that is clearly a blockchain technology that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Fair point.
- nologic01 3y ago
  The comparison of incubation periods, adoption curves etc between crypto to ML cannot take us very far. The reason is that "ML" (as a proxy for algorithmic processing of a variety of data) is not particularly adversarial to pre-existing technologies. While this is not entirely true (there is always a hidden or explicit tension between automation and expert assessments) by-and-large this tension can be managed. The new tech gets bolted on the old. In contrast crypto sought to overthrow all pre-existing monetary and financial system technology with proposals that are naive, half-baked and ignore (or reinvent in unacknowledged manner) vital aspects. The practical implication is that crypto cannot carve a legitimate niche and keep iterating. The main outcome of a lot of wasted energy (in all senses) is to point out that indeed, digitization opens up the way to evolve the financial system. So much we knew, but now it has been drilled into the heads of large swaths of politicos, regulators, bankers etc that are completely tech illiterate.
bearjaws 3y ago
Well when 90% of your budget goes to marketing and covering up your ponzi scheme, doesn't leave a whole lot to engineering.
dylan604 3y ago
which kind of proves the point that crypto wasn't about the everyday person making daily transactions. it was a pipe dream of a way to handle large amounts of money while minimizing the fees/taxes associated with fiat monies. if crypto was about the everyday person, it would have been made useful
DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
> What’s so comical about this is that common-standard digital-first micropayments is THE use case pitch for cryptocurrencies I had been following BTC since ~2009 (when a CS PhD friend of mine at uni introduced me to it, as his research project was on distributed ledgers) - but from the very start it was made clear to me that projects like Bitcoin would never be suitable for microtransactions due to the reasons that became clear to everyone since then: at the values of microtransactions (i.e. under $3 USD) the cost of committing that transaction within reasonable time-frame for a microtransaction (say, less than a minute for a mobile-game IAP purchase) is simply prohibitive and makes the legacy incumbent card networks (Visa, Mastercard, etc) seem like nimble, customer-pleasing startups.
- spraveenitpro 3y ago
  [dead]
- graypegg 3y ago
  Well said. It’s a fine line right? I’m not cheering on Visa and Mastercard. But they really do have the most customer pleasing product. If I’m betting with my own money and projects on the future of something, hard to drift towards the “universal crypto adoption”.
- toomim 3y ago
  You can use payment channels for microtransactions.
olalonde 3y ago
What's comical is when people assume that upending established financial systems, such as centuries-old fiat currencies and banks, should be a walk in the park. Such transformation doesn't merely involve introducing a disruptive technology, but necessitates overcoming many legal and societal challenges. If you'd have told anyone in 2009 that an open source decentralized currency would eventually become a trillion dollar market, or that it would be recognized as legal tender in some countries, no one would have believed you. Yet here we are with people complaining about how it hasn't yet obsoleted the US dollar.
- graypegg 3y ago
  Totally fair, it’s obviously a bit of a “no true scotsman” argument for me to move the goals posts to “crypto is only a success if it replaces X”. However if im making bets for my own projects, with my own money, I’m not seeing the incentives for the sort of massive change to actually happen. Love it or hate it, you can’t just burn down the world and start over, so something has to be aligned with the gate keepers to make this work. I don’t think it is. Without adoption it’s ceases to be valuable to those outside the magic circle, which means it’s not worth adopting.
dbmikus 3y ago
Crypto gets actual real (non-trading/non-gambling) usage in parts of LatAm. This blog post[1] from Vitalik explains a little: > Unlike wealthy countries like the United States, where financial transactions are easy to make and 8% inflation is considered extreme, in Argentina and many other countries around the world, links to global financial systems are more limited and extreme inflation is a reality every day. Cryptocurrency often steps in as a lifeline Some of the users are on battle tested decentralized solutions like Ethereum and its rollups. Others transact through centralized exchanges because fees are cheaper. And others use more centralized blockchain networks such as Tron to avoid high fees. On one hand, using central exchanges doesn't match up to the decentralized promise of the blockchain. On the other hand, it's cool to see people using crypto without caring that it's crypto. They just want to have access to more stable currencies for payments and transactions! I've seen this myself, from talking to LatAm businesses and from a friend in Argentina. [1]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html

nwienert 3y ago

ML existed since the middle of the last century but has only really found its legs as of late, but I didn’t see a lot of people make fun of it for not being perfect within a decade.

graypegg 3y ago
Fair point, but machine learning has also been creating value thru all of that time. There were products that used machine learning in the late 90s for many things. DeepBlue! I think you’re thinking of LLMs which only became possible with the shear amount of conversational data we have today. They obviously share a linage with ML, but it’s a form of training that was impossible several years prior. You can’t say that IBM DeepBlue was an early LLM and measure the timelines like that. If you know of any watershed moment for crypto that needs to happen, I would love to hear it! I just don’t see anything happening on the horizon.
- nwienert 3y ago
  I’ve been getting and continue to get value from crypto for a multitude of uses. There’s tons of people using it actively, so I just wonder why you choose to ignore that. A lot more than the very marginal value ML did for its first decades of existence. DeepBlue came many decades after the field came into being. And I’m very aware of LLM and the different types of ML. It still stands that it was very marginal for decades. But it would be easy to write some dismissive comment in the 80s that the only thing it’s done is play chess for millions of dollars - exactly like crypto haters do today despite it being a completely nascent field.
  - graypegg 3y ago
    Fair! I know there’s lots of wallet activity on any of the big chains right now. I’m a little suspicious of that representing real economic activity (filling the role of a currency, used as units of exchange) and maybe a bit more convinced it’s a casino poker chip ledger. It seems like the simple majority of people trade and transact out of their exchange, to my knowledge. If that simile of ML is like crypto is true, you stand to be quite rich! So best of luck! Best comments have net 0 right, so hopefully you’ll think of me and this thread when you’re a trillionaire eh? ;)
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    ML was not marginal for decades. It's been in regular use in a number of fields for decades. The current hype is an artifact of someone putting fun interface in front of an ML system. Hype around generative imagery and LLMs is new, not the technologies themselves. Crypto has been around for nearly a decade and a half and has been really useful for malware and scammers and not much else. It's fundamentally broken as a currency because most coins are designed to be deflationary so they behave like securities. It's fundamentally broken for micro transactions because transactions are ridiculously expensive and slow by design.
- mattdesl 3y ago
  AI and machine learning has had several decades to mature—and it had multiple “winters” where interest and funding waned. It’s possible in 60 years we might see similar leaps from distributed ledgers, zero knowledge proofs, verifiable computation, fully homomorphic encryption, and other tech being spearheaded by the crypto sector.
  - graypegg 3y ago
    It’s always possible! I’m no fortune teller. Many people have been wrong and maybe one day I’ll be laughing at my naivety. But for my own projects for the foreseeable future as measured right now, I’ll avoid. I just don’t see it becoming more than poker chips at your exchange of choice.
  - giantrobot 3y ago
    None of those things were invented or really developed by the "crypto sector" merely utilized by it. That's not a bad thing but it's disingenuous the crypto sector is really advancing any state of the art. It's implementing existing technologies mostly to facilitate scams and tax evasion.
    - mattdesl 3y ago
      All of these are primarily being funded and advanced by crypto. “Distributed ledger technology” hardly existed before blockchains/Bitcoin. Similar story with ZKP, which has gone from academic theory to real-world application (see: ZKSNARK) in the last decade primarily from blockchain research and funding streams.
      - graypegg 3y ago
        Aren’t zero knowledge proofs cryptographic signatures? I might be missing something, but that’s very much been in active use as part of any flavour RSA cryptography going back decades. Distributed ledger technology, though yes that is clearly a blockchain technology that wouldn’t exist otherwise. Fair point.
nologic01 3y ago
The comparison of incubation periods, adoption curves etc between crypto to ML cannot take us very far. The reason is that "ML" (as a proxy for algorithmic processing of a variety of data) is not particularly adversarial to pre-existing technologies. While this is not entirely true (there is always a hidden or explicit tension between automation and expert assessments) by-and-large this tension can be managed. The new tech gets bolted on the old. In contrast crypto sought to overthrow all pre-existing monetary and financial system technology with proposals that are naive, half-baked and ignore (or reinvent in unacknowledged manner) vital aspects. The practical implication is that crypto cannot carve a legitimate niche and keep iterating. The main outcome of a lot of wasted energy (in all senses) is to point out that indeed, digitization opens up the way to evolve the financial system. So much we knew, but now it has been drilled into the heads of large swaths of politicos, regulators, bankers etc that are completely tech illiterate.

bearjaws 3y ago

Well when 90% of your budget goes to marketing and covering up your ponzi scheme, doesn't leave a whole lot to engineering.

dylan604 3y ago

which kind of proves the point that crypto wasn't about the everyday person making daily transactions. it was a pipe dream of a way to handle large amounts of money while minimizing the fees/taxes associated with fiat monies. if crypto was about the everyday person, it would have been made useful

DaiPlusPlus 3y ago

> What’s so comical about this is that common-standard digital-first micropayments is THE use case pitch for cryptocurrencies I had been following BTC since ~2009 (when a CS PhD friend of mine at uni introduced me to it, as his research project was on distributed ledgers) - but from the very start it was made clear to me that projects like Bitcoin would never be suitable for microtransactions due to the reasons that became clear to everyone since then: at the values of microtransactions (i.e. under $3 USD) the cost of committing that transaction within reasonable time-frame for a microtransaction (say, less than a minute for a mobile-game IAP purchase) is simply prohibitive and makes the legacy incumbent card networks (Visa, Mastercard, etc) seem like nimble, customer-pleasing startups.

spraveenitpro 3y ago
[dead]
graypegg 3y ago
Well said. It’s a fine line right? I’m not cheering on Visa and Mastercard. But they really do have the most customer pleasing product. If I’m betting with my own money and projects on the future of something, hard to drift towards the “universal crypto adoption”.
toomim 3y ago
You can use payment channels for microtransactions.

olalonde 3y ago

What's comical is when people assume that upending established financial systems, such as centuries-old fiat currencies and banks, should be a walk in the park. Such transformation doesn't merely involve introducing a disruptive technology, but necessitates overcoming many legal and societal challenges. If you'd have told anyone in 2009 that an open source decentralized currency would eventually become a trillion dollar market, or that it would be recognized as legal tender in some countries, no one would have believed you. Yet here we are with people complaining about how it hasn't yet obsoleted the US dollar.

graypegg 3y ago
Totally fair, it’s obviously a bit of a “no true scotsman” argument for me to move the goals posts to “crypto is only a success if it replaces X”. However if im making bets for my own projects, with my own money, I’m not seeing the incentives for the sort of massive change to actually happen. Love it or hate it, you can’t just burn down the world and start over, so something has to be aligned with the gate keepers to make this work. I don’t think it is. Without adoption it’s ceases to be valuable to those outside the magic circle, which means it’s not worth adopting.

dbmikus 3y ago

Crypto gets actual real (non-trading/non-gambling) usage in parts of LatAm. This blog post[1] from Vitalik explains a little: > Unlike wealthy countries like the United States, where financial transactions are easy to make and 8% inflation is considered extreme, in Argentina and many other countries around the world, links to global financial systems are more limited and extreme inflation is a reality every day. Cryptocurrency often steps in as a lifeline Some of the users are on battle tested decentralized solutions like Ethereum and its rollups. Others transact through centralized exchanges because fees are cheaper. And others use more centralized blockchain networks such as Tron to avoid high fees. On one hand, using central exchanges doesn't match up to the decentralized promise of the blockchain. On the other hand, it's cool to see people using crypto without caring that it's crypto. They just want to have access to more stable currencies for payments and transactions! I've seen this myself, from talking to LatAm businesses and from a friend in Argentina. [1]: https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html