> leading the charge on what could be the next major technical revolution
Unsubstantiated hype. Where is the revolution? A common thread among cryptocurrency enthusiasts is that the revolution is coming... except it never does. When you talk about revolution, non-enthusiasts roll their eyes.
> Silicon Valley has been getting fat on the virtually unlimited venture capital power structure and sees this as a threat they've missed out on to their power.
A classic argument from crypto enthusiasts who have to imagine that people are literally afraid of bitcoin. It's laughably condescending and absurd. Bitcoin is not a threat to anyone and most certainly not silicon valley billionaires. Besides, it's not as if SV VCs haven't invested money in bitcoin, it's just that bitcoin is a horrible investment, e.g. 21.co, 120 million in VC dollars flushed down the toilet for a business model that was clearly a failure from the start, but those investors fell vulnerable to the hype and learned a valuable lesson from it.
> Maybe the disrupters are being disrupted
Another sample of breathless hyperbole that causes non-enthusiasts to cringe. Where is the disruption? Bitcoin is a smidgeon of a fraction of the commerce activity happening on the internet, and even with the rising price, bitcoin remains difficult and relatively unsafe to use (for the non-technical masses) and provides zero benefits for most people. Yes, peer to peer transmission of value is cool, I'm not saying bitcoin is useless, but for most people there is no reason to use bitcoin and there never will be. Contrast these facts on the ground with the never-ending blockchain hype and the result is overall disillusionment with blockchains in general.
It took decades before the Internet was useful to "the masses." I don't think there's some conspiracy among VCs, but I do think dismissing cryptocurrencies for the reasons you have is short-sighted.
> Where is the revolution? A common thread among cryptocurrency enthusiasts is that the revolution is coming... except it never does.
A technology doesn't need to have all of its potential realized in the first few years of its existence.
> Where is the disruption? Bitcoin is a smidgeon of a fraction of the commerce activity happening on the internet
The Internet was a fraction of the commerce activity happening relative to Sears / JC Penney / Walmart. Yet clearly only a few decades later all of these are disrupted by the Internet.
> bitcoin remains difficult and relatively unsafe to use (for the non-technical masses) and provides zero benefits for most people.
...as was the Internet for the first few decades.
> Contrast these facts on the ground with the never-ending blockchain hype and the result is overall disillusionment with blockchains in general.
This compares directly to, "Have you ever heard of radio?"
Literally every dismissal of cryptocurrencies you made would have applied exactly to the Internet in the early '90s or prior. There are far more similarities than "people were skeptical of both." It's totally fine to take your position but it's unrealistic to claim these as reasons it can't succeed.
It seems I'm not getting through to you.
Just because two things have something in common doesn't mean that they're the same thing.
Showing that people were skeptical of the internet and blockchains does not demonstrate that blockchains will be as successful as the internet. There is no connection between the two (besides the fact that blockchains are software that run on the internet, like all things on the internet). They are totally different.
- Carl Sagan
Of course they're not the same thing. That doesn't mean it's now totally valid to claim that it won't be successful due to the same roadblocks that the Internet overcame easily.
Do you have any arguments against cryptocurrencies that don't mirror early problems the Internet had, that people warned about, but ended up being very solvable? I think that'd be a lot more convincing.
This is why it's not the revolutionary thing everyone is saying it is. As a cryptocurrency blockchain is the killer implementation. For anything else it just becomes a ridiculously bloated, clumsy, and slow database that hardly anyone understands and wastes electricity.
What you're really talking about is the Web. That's the inflection point. Even email, a non-Web-based technology, saw a huge surge in adoption after free webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo came on the scene.
The big difference between the early Web and early blockchain is the barrier to entry. It was easy to set up websites--still is. That's how you got so many super young people finding huge success out of nowhere.
In comparison, blockchain has an incredibly hard barrier to entry. Not to use it--to build it. If you want to build a robust reliable blockchain, you need very solid cryptography skills. Very few people have that.
The structure of the growth has inverted. In the late 90s you had a lot of people you never heard of, and who were routinely dismissed by industry leaders. But they were building real products that took real business away from old established companies. The Web grew ground-up.
Today, the biggest pushers of blockchain are big established companies. Goldman Sachs. IBM. JP Morgan. The New York Stock Exchange. Big banks, big lawyers, big investors, etc.
I've been meeting with government entities in a country who IBM is heavily influencing with marketing. There are very low hanging fruit kind of technical problems that can be easily solved by mediocre CRUD app developers but due to the money in this region, companies like Oracle and more recently IBM has swooped in and sold them a bunch of things they don't need and have no idea how to integrate to solve the problems they're facing. Don't know how to build REST APIs? Buy our middleware!
Sitting down with people in charge of making these decisions and it's apparent they haven't the slightest clue what they're getting into. Their teams don't have the technical ability to build REST APIs to integrate with each others services, and now they've bought into IBM's message queue without a single developer on their side with the competence or experience to know what it is.
They've sold them solutions without taking into consideration the problem.
Now blockchain is the newest buzzword, spoken about like some magic IT pixie dust that was just invented to solve any technical problem -- "NOW you can go paperless, can make transactions, can store health records, provide government services" as if before it wasn't possible. Somehow people with no technical background are profiting immensely by holding conferences and speaking about things they don't understand. People are literally conversing with each other without having any idea what they're saying.
We got an email recently from an entity that is very interested in our platform stating "we want your product, and all new software must be blockchain enabled," whatever that means.
I recently went to a tech event first person I met was pitching his blockchain company about to launch next month. When questioned, within a few minutes he relented that they were not using blockchain at all.
The internet is great because it grants the ability to communicate worldwide at minimal cost, to distribute software at minimal cost, and to replicate information at zero cost.
While copying is great for knowledge, it's problematic for value. Blockchain solves this, now you can share applications and communicate globally with objects of value. That's it.
I don't know if any of the current implementations will survive. I could see blockchain only running a small subset of online activity relating to finance, insurance, and law. I could also see it rendering our current conception of the internet sector as the media/advertising niche, the way cable changed broadcast TV forever.
Mostly I think the tech is really cool. So I'm going to keep messing with it. But I appreciate the skepticism, it means there's work to do.
Even assuming it were trivially easy and perfectly safe to use, there are numerous other risks currently associated with it.
Just look at its recent volatility, for example.
To me, the revolution is the realization that certain softwares don't need to be built, merely described and they will bring certain things into being. If Satoshi hadn't built Bitcoin, he had simply released the paper, I think Bitcoin would still exist today. That's interesting. I don't think the same is true, if, for example Mark Zuckerberg had just described Facebook rather than writing it.
The insight is: when a set of incentive structures stable and self-reinforcing, they can become an autonomous agent of their own, existing on top of, but also outside of, human activities.
Very interesting. And I think it is revolutionary. The revolution hasn't happened yet though, perhaps that's what you're pointing out?
The computer revolution hasn't even happened yet though. Still only a tiny number of us can use computers directly. Most people need to use another human (some programmer who makes a static human interface for them) as a proxy. The Big Talk claims of the computer revolution won't happen until we're past this phase. These things take time.
Without Satoshi actually building it, the barrier for his idea being seen as success would be to build the entire system. Much easier to just mock it and ignore it. With it being built, all someone has to do to test the system is do a little mining or send a transaction.
Its your assertion that no such person would have emerged between 2008 and now, if Satoshi hadn't written the reference implementation in 2009? What is your reason for believing that?
I have a grudge against crypt-currencies because their proponents think:
+ Implementations don't need specs
+ PL theory is below them (static typing? referential transparency?)
+ Repeated million dollar hacks aren't a problem
+ There's no shame in lying about the core purpose of your product (Etherium: The implementation is the LAW. Except when we don't feel like it.)
The sad thing is there are lots of cool things crypto currencies can do. They're great for moving money between countries (the banking system really needs to get its act together here). They're great for bug bounties. Someday they'll be good for contracts (bug-free code is possible if you take it seriously). Proponents should focus on those things ... but it's hard to take criticism seriously when you just want to pump up the value of your coins.
Come on, you can't generalize things like that on a group such as cryptocurrency users. I think this generalization tells more about you than cryptocurrency proponents.
The real revolution is in smart contracts and virtual machines that run on a blockchain and the ability to define ownership of a distributed organization to distribute profits accordingly. Blockchains on blockchains that having turing complete contracts that can guarantee there isn't even the ability to cheat the distributed, mainly anonymous organization participants.
We aren't even close to that - it still takes an incredibly suspect ICO to raise money by selling stake for a top level coin in which they will inevitably have to convert partially to fiat and the vast potential for scams there. But the smart contract can be programmatically limited and only release funds over time and only continue to when certain events have taken place, and refund otherwise, etc. I guess I just see the vast potential here. More infrastructure supporting things is required and I'm not sure what that is but someone will discover these pieces.
I see many more Asian and European groups trying to build these types of things today. Maybe it's out of necessity as well since there isn't a vast source of wealth available to fund these crazy, new ideas.
Sounds like something utterly complex even to describe, so imagine how more difficult it is for any average person to identify as a problem they have and care about.
Machine-readable contracts need to be much simpler and much clearer to work. I've suggested decision tables as a format; those are declarative, guaranteed to terminate, and have a simple chart form that's easy to understand. Yes, they're more limited.
It's not enough that contracts execute. They have to be amenable to audit.
There's this amazing lack of vision and inability to see that things can and will be innovated on. Why would it be anywhere near perfect by this iteration? Why would you expect that?
Also in terms of complexity - have you ever read an actual legal contract? Do you think 99.9% of people understand that?
Because e.g. computers despite being primitive were still very damn useful the very first time they were built. In fact their utility preceded their being built (e.g. to have them assist war efforts and research calculations), not vice versa.
e.g., the $50 million distributed to The DAO hacker.
The DAO was the first famous smart contract, on the first popular smart contract platform. Every objection to smart contracts in the past couple of decades (computer programs model real law badly, immutability means you need to be a perfect programmer, immutability copes badly with changes in circumstances) came true, bang bang bang.
Though I think even blockchain objectors were surprised when Ethereum came up with a new one: your smart contract is IMMUTABLE right up to the moment the big boys are in danger of losing money.
Later of course we were reminded of the programming perfection requirement extending to all layers of the stack, e.g. the Solidity compiler bug that meant that a mathematically-proven-perfect contract could have a 'sploit.
Smart contracts are a terrible and stupid idea, and The DAO should have put the idea firmly in the bin. That it didn't is a testament to human gullibility and the power of wishful thinking rather than the value of smart contracts.
Largest crowdfunding in history can't be ignored - whether it ends in tears for most investors is another matter entirely.
Can you do this now without a smart contract? Of course. The usefulness is in that it's universally visible and lowers the barrier to entry and is far less complex.
Please give me an example of how an agreement can be enforced by a smart contract.
> When an actor fails to live up their obligation they are refused payment
It works the same way with colored pebbles.
> There is no way to take off with something that is not yours
Why not? I know this is an abstract question in this context which is why I asked for a practical example so we could share a thought experiment regarding how the use of a smart-contract would play out in real life.
> There is no reliable or efficient way to cheat
Cheat what? Once again this is totally abstract. Seems to me like cheating is just as easy if not easier because the role of law-enforcement is questionable at best and nonexistent at worst. To cheat, all I have to do is agree to the terms of the contract then violate it after I have secured the funds or property. Then what?
> You don't have to know the other actors you are making an agreement for something with
I'll grant that this is possible and useful in special cases (e.g. online drug markets), but that is a benefit of blockchain money and smart contracts don't offer any benefit
> far less complex
This is certainly not the case, as victims of the DAO and orphaned eth blockchain can attest to.
"bAIRBNB VERSUS AIRBNB
bAirbnb is a distributed application (DApp), a set of smart contracts that stores data on a home-listings blockchain. The bAirbnb app has an elegant interface: owners can upload information and pictures of their property. The platform maintains reputation scores of both providers and renters to improve everyone’s business decisions.
When you want to rent, the bAirbnb software scans and filters the blockchain for all the listings that meet your criteria (e.g., ten miles from the Eiffel Tower, two bedrooms, four-plus star ratings only). Your user experience is identical to that in Airbnb, except that you communicate peer to peer on the network, through encrypted and cryptographically signed messages not stored in Airbnb’s database. You and the room owner are the only two people who can read these messages. You can swap phone numbers, an exchange that Airbnb blocks to preserve future revenues. On bAirbnb you and the owner could communicate off-chain and complete the transaction entirely off-chain, but you are better off completing the transaction on-chain for a few reasons.
Reputation: Because the network records the transaction on the blockchain, a positive review from each user improves your respective reputations. The risk of a negative review motivates each party to remain honest. Remember, people with good reputations can use the same persona across multiple DApps and benefit from continuity as a good person.
Identity Verification: Because we are not dealing with a centralized system that checks ID on our behalf, each party needs to confirm the other party’s identity. The blockchain calls up a contract from a “VerifyID” application, one of many contracts that bAirbnb, SUber (blockchain Uber), and other DApps use to verify real-world identity.
Privacy Protection: VerifyID doesn’t track and store all transactions in a database. It simply returns a TRUE or FALSE when it receives a request for verification of a public key (persona). Different kinds of DApps can call VerifyID, but VerifyID never knows details of transactions. This separation of identity from activity greatly improves your privacy. Risk Reduction: Home owners currently store customer identities and financial data on their own servers, which can be hacked and leaked, exposing owners to litigation and large liabilities. On the blockchain, you needn’t trust a vendor with your data; there is no central database to hack and leak. There are only individual peer-to-peer pseudonymous transactions.
Insurance: Today Airbnb offers $1 million insurance for owners and compensates them for theft and damage. On bAirbnb, owners can get the bAirbnb insurance DApp. Renters with good reputations like you have lower insurance rates and needn’t subsidize renters who lack caution, scrutiny of prospects, or poor treatment of property. When you submit a booking request, bAirbnb sends your public key (persona) to the insurance contract for a quote. The insurance DApp contacts a list of trusted providers; fake insurers need not apply. Insurers perform their own calculations in real time through autonomous agent software based on the inputs to the contract—such as the market value of the owner’s house, how much the owner wants insured, owner reputation, your reputation as a renter, and rental price. bAirbnb takes the best bid and adds it to the nightly fee the owner wants to charge. The blockchain processes this calculation in the background; owners and renters have a comparable user experience to that of Airbnb but a superior and more equitable value exchange.
Payment Settlement: Of course, on the blockchain, you transfer funds to the owner in seconds, not days as with Airbnb. Owners can manage security deposits more easily with smart contracts. Some parties use escrow accounts to release payments partially (nightly, weekly, hourly, etc.) or in full as the parties agree. In disputes involving smart contracts, parties can call for arbitration.
Property Access Using Smart Locks (IoT device): A smart lock connected to the blockchain knows when you have paid. When you arrive, your near-field communication-enabled smart phone can sign a message with your public key as proof of payment, and the smart lock will open for you. Owners need not drop keys off to you or visit the property unless they want to say hello or address some emergency.
You and the owner have now saved most of the 15 percent Airbnb fee. Settlements are assured and instant. There are no foreign exchange fees for international contracts. You need not worry about stolen identity. Local governments in oppressive regimes cannot subpoena bAirbnb for all its rental history data. This is the real sharing-of-value economy; both customers and service providers are the winners."
Essentially, it can turn any centralized middleman system, which are most companies in the world today, into decentralized ones, where the processing happens not on central servers but in the decentralized network.
It also doesn't address compliance with laws on payments and money transfers. Regardless of what the anarchists might want, those rules aren't going away and will be enforced vigorously by many governments.
Why can't a blockchain technology in a matter of years offer the same type of convenience and stability with a much lower price due to the decentralized nature of it all?
Right now they can't you're right. But there is no reason to believe with certainty they won't in the future. Of course they might not but I'd bet the other way by virtue of the plain as day benefit they offer motivating iterative improvement over the many coming years.
However, it is a known issue and there are proposals and I'm sure more to come. Sharding is a leading proposal and it has been described. However, I cannot personally comment on the viability.
But I'm an optimist and believe it will be solved. Maybe not with Ethereum but eventually with something.
The one fallacy to be aware of is a lot of people it appears think that blockchain technologies are static. As if they can't evolve and change and iterate. They can and if history is any indicator they will so long as there is interest and outlandish people see potential.
I wasn't aware this was how Airbnb operated. I was under the impression whoever made the listing on Airbnb never saw details of the renters payment details.
> In disputes involving smart contracts, parties can call for arbitration.
Call who? A lawyer? Their heavies? Who's paying to operate all this infrastructure?
> Local governments in oppressive regimes cannot subpoena bAirbnb for all its rental history data.
So governments will outlaw it and prosecute anyone caught operating a bAirbnb, which should be simple to do because all this listings are publicly visibly. Which should also be true of real Airbnb now, but charging people who renting their houses / units / whatever illegally seems to be fairly low on the police's list of priorities. Oppressive regimes, however, tend to go after people for what should be trivial matters, which is what makes them oppressive.
Governments can also order ISPs to block certain types of network traffic, thereby denying access to these services.
I'm a bit rusty on my crypto-currency knowledge, but I seem to remember that there is the possibility of a 51% attack, wherein if an evil actor managed to control 51% or more of the network, they could basically wreak all sorts of havoc on the network, from denial of service, to double-spending of coins to rewriting of (recent) transaction history.
As for feasibility, some mining groups have already briefly obtained 51% control of the network "by accident", but if you want to go the black hat route though, DDOS a large portion of the network, spin up a few dormant bots and presto, you have your 51%.
So it isn't impossible to cheat, and certainly not impractical.
This is a major problem. Has this problem been addressed at all?
While this doesn't remove all risks (e.g. an incredibly large mining pool), it is certainly harder to disable thousands of independent miners than it is to do so to a single centralized operation.
Sometimes it does come down to punctuation, but all of the time it comes down to what was meant with the contract.
Letting the system only mean what it says is not great for users, either. You get an overhead of always having to check and double check everything you do.
I don't know if this would be currently possible with Ethereum because I haven't looked very deep into its technology, but if not I'm pretty sure some blockchain will allow this kind of interactions.
For more examples, check: https://www.ethereum.org/token
Consider what happens if someone takes the loan and never repays it. If you have a government with a functioning court system you can use any commonly accepted contract form, even a signed IOU, so a blockchain adds no value even if you do convince the court it's trustworthy; if you don't have a reliable court system, they can just walk away and you've just spent a lot of money on irrelevant infrastructure. If you have a credit rating system and sufficient proof of identity there might be a consequence but in every case the real value appears to be created by other entities (government IDs and courts; private credit rating services), none of which even need to know what a blockchain is.
One concept would be to raise funds that can allow you arbitrage at a scalable level. Request funds (ICO) and have the smart contract enable a certain subset of those funds for your organization to use to arbitrage other crypto's. Profits are spread across stakeholders based on their investment, represented as the tokens they generated in the ICO.
Enforce this by only allowing a certain part of the funds to become available at certain times based on performance. Stake holders could vote using a contract to determine if more funds should be released.
This is not unreasonable, but you have to admit that it is a far cry from imminent revolution and a key reason why people are skeptical of this technology especially considering the bottomless pit of grandiose hype that accompanies it.
> One concept would be to raise funds that can allow you arbitrage at a scalable level. Request funds (ICO) and have the smart contract enable a certain subset of those funds for your organization to use to arbitrage other crypto's. Profits are spread across stakeholders based on their investment, represented as the tokens they generated in the ICO.
Ok, but all you've really described here is a higher level abstraction for playing the cryptomarkets rather than a useful product or service that is enabled by the technology itself. If you aren't interested in gambling your money on the cryptomarkets then this idea is useless.
I find the entire thing interesting and in fact the most boring bit is the instant millionaire greed fueling unfounded hype.
If I had the great idea I wouldn't be hear talking about it. I'm getting a better and better grip I feel but it could all be fallacy too!
But, someone or some group are going to be far more able to see the bigger picture I imagine and unleash something completely new, practical and useful.
Makers build things and post it to a Website and price it in some crypto currency.
People buy it by sending money to a smart contract.
A third party "oracle" is used to remit payment when the order is received. For instance the company that ships the product will signal delivery to the contract.
The company that hosted the product takes a percent of the transaction payable after the final payment goes through.
The investors in the ICO for the product get profits distributed threw the contract hosted on the same blockchain.
The host of the site gets paid from the profits based on the contract and their payment address.
Managers, marketing, developers, all staff gets paid from a piece of the profits. This is all defined in the smart contracts.
This is far away from today and simplified and with many scams in-between as well. But smart contracts on a block chain which interact and signal other contracts, etc with a block chain on a blockchain used for proof of work and payment.
A company in this form could outperform and be more efficient than one today. This is what would be useful.
Smart contracts won't take off for the simple reason that they don't offer anything that existing processes don't already handle better than even the theoretical best case that smart contract proponents have offered.
I think the thing they offer is the potential for great efficiency and thus lower cost and also a lower barrier to entry for systems that require trust.
What I'm most optimistic about is the next phase - how can we scale this and then what can we build on top to further practical use? That's a more interesting discussion than dismissing it all together.
Bitcoin introduced the blockchain and some good ideas about how it could be used. Ethereum ran with some of those ideas. There's even more ideas on how this can expanded we'll maybe see in a few years.
The customer benefit is that because the business is run more efficiently things can be priced cheaper. This gets passed down to the consumer and producer.
It's far more than escrow. It's a distributed business where many of the functions of the business are automated all enforced on the same blockchain.
Could be crazy - I'm not pitching this! I'm sure many people have better grasps of the potential and imaginations. But you clearly don't see how a company can be run more efficiently (but massive margins) with a distributed, partially anonymous structure where obligations and payments are guaranteed through the shared system.
Everything you've described (i.e., payments) can already be handled by existing automated financial systems like ADP, Peoplesoft, Intuit, etc. Order status is already handled by existing invoicing systems (i.e., Square) and delivery providers (i.e., UPS). And all of these systems can be made to integrate with each other; plenty of businesses do that every year.
Now imagine we could do this in a public way that can't be cheated easily at all? We create new efficiency, ironically, by centralizing much of this on a globally distributed blockchain with computational rules enforcing the flow of business. Suddenly we don't need these companies because their most valuable asset, trust, has been automated away.
The business that figures out how to do this will claim the market of existing companies.
Software eats the world. Why wouldn't it continue to in a way that eats the existing software centralization?
It doesn't mean it's free but it certainly looks to have the ability to outperform current business models which came to be because they outperformed previous business models.
I think it's more out of necessity because of the lack of the comprehensive and (relatively) solid way that you can litigate in the USA and European Union when business dealings go south. Capitalism in the East and the Soviet Bloc countries is improving their lives but it's also shockingly unregulated, arguably similar to the US in the roaring 20's. Back then that meant contracts were enforced at the barrel of a gun, but while the contractual law litigation doesn't work well in those countries, they can handle murderers pretty well so instead they find the cryptocurrencies attractive because it gives them options to protect their assets in a way that is immune to violence or petty theft.
At least that's my 0.02.
Cryptocurrency wants to move people up the banking hierarchy. So it tries to lift Eastern Europeans to the level of New Yorkers, in terms of access to stable currencies and transfers. But it also tries to lift the New Yorkers to the level of Wall Street executives in terms of issuing securities. And it tries to lift the Wall Street executives to nation states in terms of creating self-contained regulatory regimes.
The endgame is that all of these power relations become so commonplace that they lose their power. Like clothing has become.
It won't feel like anything is changing for a while though. Imagine the Titanic slowly sinking... at first the ship is tilting a bit, in a funny way, but nothing unusual. Then you start to notice the floor is on a distinct slope, but things are still in the same place relative to each other, so you think the whole world hasn't changed, just one property of it.
Eventually people start involuntarily sliding in one direction, which is different, but there's still structure there. It's not as if there's no ship anymore. Then, the slope becomes so large that almost everything seems beholden to it. That's the point at which everyone starts to agree that "everything has changed". Finally the ship sinks into the sea.
We're still early in that process.
creation of old financial instruments is also fine by me: working capital loans, bridging loans, factoring, repos, commercial paper, bills of lading, letters of credit, etc.... you know, the stuff that businesses will typically need.
In that case your client is essentially messing with you.
Also, irriversible payments without a chargeback mechanism may be a feature to you and many, however more people see it as a bug.
Second I think that people in the US--Silicon Valley included--have the benefit of good corporate governance on many of the centralized authorities that underpin the economy. SWIFT, DTCC, etc. People who live in countries where that is not the case have a lot more to gain from the technology. That may explain some of the relative popularity outside the US.
[1] https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume?...
It's too close to the conspiratorial and/or anti-establishment mindset to be comfortable.
... may be most appealing to others.
> It's too close to the conspiratorial and/or anti-establishment mindset to be comfortable.
"counterantidisintermediation"
And if I had a real dollar for everyone raving about some optimistic Bitcoin utopia...
>This may just be my general observation but I feel like Silicon Valley hegemony has a grudge against crypto currencies and I'm not sure why.
Because they're a solution of a problem that doesn't exist? Or rather, whose actual solution is political, not technical.
>Maybe the disrupters are being disrupted?
Or maybe the fad is over and nobody much cared?
Coinbase is currently the top bitcoin exchange in the world. Have a look at their traffic: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/coinbase.com
Not only are they in the top 1000 websites in the world, but they have set a new traffic record every day of 2017, without exception.
For a "revolutionary" "disruptive" technology to have, after 8 years and tons of coverage and touting, its "top exchange" merely hit the top 1000 is not exactly something to write home about. There are sites even in the Top 200 - 500 that are totally irrelevant (the "power law" distribution of visitors falls quickly after the top 10-20 websites).
Now, take away developing world etc safe-keeping and money laundering motives, and add in some heightened regulations from national governments (when/if it gets to a size worthy to regulate properly), and adoption will get close to zero.
Texting seemed fine but yet here we are with many billions of market cap for messaging programs.
I agree there's hype on the other side of it too - look at the recent ICO craze. I'm not saying that crypto isn't getting love. But that it isn't getting much love from a very particular place. A place that traditionally has never had a problem embracing a million odd ideas. A place with a culture where 90% failure is expected because that 10% success more than makes up for it.
I just find it conspicuous.
What way? Because people absolutely would have jumped at the chance to go from a place to another faster (and more comfortably) and had myriads of reasons to want to do so at any time in history.
>I'm not saying that crypto isn't getting love. But that it isn't getting much love from a very particular place. A place that traditionally has never had a problem embracing a million odd ideas. A place with a culture where 90% failure is expected because that 10% success more than makes up for it.
Well, is it getting much love from ANY other place though, except a small niche of enthusiasts?
The first cars were incredibly noisy, smelly, and actually killed a lot of folks. Yet somehow, here we are something like 100 years later, evaluating how many more years we'll have to wait before we can get go place to place without even having to touch a steering wheel.
And despite that their utility was evident, and adoption very fast.
Even so, bitcoin is not supposed to improve with time. It is an invention that is delivered as is (technology and algorithm wise). At best they can make better exchanges. But there are also very real possibilities of regression to those (stricter regulations imposed, etc).
Blockchain is a cool algorithm that can be useful if the situation calls for it. Ethereum is a cool idea that I'm skeptical of, but hey, that's why they're doing it and I'm not. I have my own ongoing bets. But I'm seeing much more of the marketing department using "blockchain" as a catchphrase to turn heads. Specifically the heads that don't actually understand what blockchains are.
There seems to be a pretty strong trend in Silicon Valley away from decentralization and towards centralized and controlled platforms. You can see this with IoT (e.g. your alarm clock bricks when the company's proprietary server is shut down), Social Networks, and "the Cloud" in general.
What I find peculiar is a flat out, almost arrogant, rejection of blockchain (and what I believe is a fundamental misunderstanding) from our technological elite.
It's almost as if they are focusing on the wrong thing which to me is the nearly comical surge in "value" of some crypto currencies and the literal view that they are and can only be a store of value.
There's plenty of scams and stupidity but there's also real potential I believe. I'm very possibly a naive fool too.
http://freekeene.com/2017/06/07/nh-governor-signs-bill-prote...
This may just be my general observation but I feel like Silicon Valley hegemony has a grudge against crypto currencies and I'm not sure why. For an industry that has constantly tried new things and saw potential where no one else did, I just don't see the love for the potential of smart contracts, DApps, etc. And how this is just the beginning of what is possible and of course it's isn't perfect but it's fascinating to the curious.
I do see a lot of enthusiasm from Eastern Europeans and all across Asia and they seem to be leading the charge on what could be the next major technical revolution.
My working hypothesis right now is Silicon Valley has been getting fat on the virtually unlimited venture capital power structure and sees this as a threat they've missed out on to their power.
Maybe the disrupters are being disrupted?