Re:Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in vi...
by nostrademons on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @09:32PM
(#16480210)
I don't suppose you remember the last P2P bubble, which started with Napster in 1999 and effectively ended when Mark Zuckerburg decided Facebook was a better bet than WireHog in 2004?
That also was a period of incredible excitement and real action - within 5 years, we got Napster, Gnutella, FreeNet, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy, Bittorrent, and Skype, along with lots of little programs that nobody's heard of (among them Red Swoosh, Travis Kalanick's first startup, and WireHog, the product that Facebook almost became) and academic research projects like Chord and Kademlia. The recording industry was being eviscerated - it did manage to kill Tower Records - and everyone was saying that movies would be next, and that P2P technology (with no central server, no single point of failure, and nobody to sue or imprison) would lead to the downfall of nation states and dictatorships and a fundamental change in the power balance of the world.
It did change the world, in that Tower Records is still dead, nobody buys albums anymore, and peoples' music tastes have diverged markedly. But the change everyone wanted - where power devolves from government entities and big corporations to ordinary people like you and I - never happened. Instead, the public lost interest. Instead of decentralized systems like IRC and Jabber, they got on Facebook. Instead of censorship-resistant systems like FreeNet, they got the Great Firewall of China. Instead of easy music sharing like Napster and Audiogalaxy, they got streaming services like iTunes and Spotify. Change came, but it just meant replacing one set of overlords with another.
It's very likely the same will happen with Bitcoin & Blockchain. It already is - that's what the article is about.
That also was a period of incredible excitement and real action - within 5 years, we got Napster, Gnutella, FreeNet, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy, Bittorrent, and Skype, along with lots of little programs that nobody's heard of (among them Red Swoosh, Travis Kalanick's first startup, and WireHog, the product that Facebook almost became) and academic research projects like Chord and Kademlia. The recording industry was being eviscerated - it did manage to kill Tower Records - and everyone was saying that movies would be next, and that P2P technology (with no central server, no single point of failure, and nobody to sue or imprison) would lead to the downfall of nation states and dictatorships and a fundamental change in the power balance of the world.
It did change the world, in that Tower Records is still dead, nobody buys albums anymore, and peoples' music tastes have diverged markedly. But the change everyone wanted - where power devolves from government entities and big corporations to ordinary people like you and I - never happened. Instead, the public lost interest. Instead of decentralized systems like IRC and Jabber, they got on Facebook. Instead of censorship-resistant systems like FreeNet, they got the Great Firewall of China. Instead of easy music sharing like Napster and Audiogalaxy, they got streaming services like iTunes and Spotify. Change came, but it just meant replacing one set of overlords with another.
It's very likely the same will happen with Bitcoin & Blockchain. It already is - that's what the article is about.