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?
> 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.