Those had immediate, obvious value which were held back by the technology: every military in the world wanted flight (remember those Civil War hot air balloons?), as well as things like postal services, etc. There was zero question that as soon as the technology was functionally available, people would buy it. Similarly, the earliest photographs had unquestionable demand but were held back by the technology — again, zero question that people would buy it as soon as that matured.

Finally, the Internet was useful by 1982 — there's a reason why universities, governments, etc. all jumped online and agencies like NSF were funding this to support other research, not just development of TCP/IP, by then. The other big trend to keep in mind are the BBS scene and especially online services like CompuServe (which was already 13 years old by 1982) which had profitable businesses selling access to people who found it was useful to have in their lives for many reasons not related to developing or selling computer networking. Again, there was zero question of demand: computer hardware was expensive and networking was positively usurious but it was clear that growth would accelerate as soon as that changed because normal people found it useful for various parts of their lives.

Cryptocurrencies are different: since these systems rely on the now-pervasive web, most people on the planet have had access immediately. What hasn't happened yet is most of them having a reason to bother with it. Speculation has been the biggest driver but buy-and-hold is toxic to developing a useful currency and few people have built a business or life which depends on it except for gambling like that.

In 1998 I wanted to buy a router ( or a modem ) to connect my computer to the internet. I was asked questions like: why internet? What for? what do you gain from it? Nothing was obvious.

I don’t know where that was but it’s at least a decade late for the United States - by 1998, Amazon was profitable in multiple markets (that year they reported $610M in revenue) and a ton of other companies, non-profits, and government agencies were seeing plenty of traffic. Here’s a list even earlier:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...

In 1998, I was working for a web design business which had a mix of startups and established companies (a couple of F100s and some F500s, as well as smaller local companies). None of those were “web” companies - they sold things like pet supplies or knives, offered financial services, did biomedical research, etc. but what they all had in common was that they benefited from being on the web because their customers were moving there and they could offer them a better experience and/or lower costs this way.

That still hasn’t happened for cryptocurrencies despite a much larger potential customer base, lower barriers to entry, and twice as much time. If Bitcoin abruptly halted today, almost no businesses outside of the field would even notice and the few who did would mostly be removing the least used payment option on their site. That’s the difference: there’s been just as much marketing, the same level of squandering VC money on Super Bowl ads and stadium naming rights, etc. but there doesn’t seem to be anything more than that sizzle this time.

Bitcoin and crypto has an immediate, obvious value that was previously held back by technology. Similar to the rest of the examples you've listed.

We live in an age where we are forced to own nothing and be happy. Bitcoin, Blockchain and crypto solves this.

Crypto does not bypass in any way the ability for a company to charge me a subscription instead of offering me an option to buy something outright.

If you keep money in the bank. You don't own it, the bank does. You need permission to access it and are limited on what you are allowed to use it for.

If you keep cash or gold in a safe place. You are only allowed to keep a certain amount. It can be seized at will.

Your will that declares what assets go to your children. The deed to your home. The lease for your car. Certificates. Art. Tickets. Contracts. Money.

We do not own any of these things without the requirement of having to trust a person, a comp ay or a government.

Blockchain technology allows us to own anything that can be documented on a ledger. Indefinitely. Trustlessly.

> Trustlessly

With cryptocurrencies, you need to trust:

* The exchanges (and other ramps for getting useful money into the system and out of the system)

* The developers of the chain

* The developers of the smart contracts

* The developers of wallets

* The miners

* The internet providers

* The hardware manufacturers

* The government (yes, they could punish usage of cryptocurrencies hard if they wanted to)

> Your will that declares what assets go to your children. The deed to your home. The lease for your car. Certificates. Art. Tickets. Contracts. Money.

Which can all be lost or stolen easily without a central authority and a judicial system. Do not underestimate the power of phishing, especially if it is directed towards specific people.

> With cryptocurrencies, you need to trust: * The exchanges (and other ramps for getting useful money into the system and out of the system)

Decentralized Finance, Protocols and Apps do not require trust.

The frontend and backend of every protocol you are expected to use is open source. Things can only go wrong, without the fault of your own if you use something closed-source or custodial.

Cryptocurrency allows you to take responsibility.

> Which can all be lost or stolen easily without a central authority and a judicial system. Do not underestimate the power of phishing, especially if it is directed towards specific people.

Blockchain gives the world the ability to not rely on the local central authority. Your data will not be edited, removed, lost, stolen or damaged either.

You can write up a contract, leasing me your land for 99 years, on paper, with a witness and kept a copy with the local central authority. This can go well, until it goes wrong.

In 99 years, my estate may refuse to give the land back to you without proof of the paper it was written on. We could claim the paper is a fake. The local central authority can be bias, corrupt or dissolved. Which many authorities are.

If you used blockchain instead of paper. The contract remains unchanged, and ready to read at any time, until the very last computer on this planet is turned off.

> Decentralized Finance, Protocols and Apps do not require trust.

> The frontend and backend of every protocol you are expected to use is open source. Things can only go wrong, without the fault of your own if you use something closed-source or custodial.

Are you seriously claiming that something cannot have bugs because it's open source? That nobody will use an oracle or otherwise have outside dependencies?

In reality, these systems do require trust. Most people do not have the skills to audit everything they use — even if, as we've seen so many times in the cryptocurrency world, they incorrectly believe they do — and the people who do have those skills wouldn't have time to audit everything they touch if these systems ever see widespread adoption. Everyone using them is trusting other parties at multiple levels, and there's no way to avoid that for most transactions.

> Cryptocurrency allows you to take responsibility.

Less misleadingly, cryptocurrency requires you to take responsibility for everything. This is not a feature for the vast majority of people because it's a large amount of highly-skilled work which you're required to do constantly as things update and the failure mode is that you're now penniless.

> Blockchain gives the world the ability to not rely on the local central authority. Your data will not be edited, removed, lost, stolen or damaged either.

This is pure naivety. If the blockchain says I own a house and the men with guns say you do, guess who wins? If your government is corrupt, the blockchain won’t help. If your government is not corrupt, the extra cost and risk from using a blockchain aren’t buying you anything.

At most, this problem needs PKI to register claims but the current system works well and all of the failure modes are things which blockchains either don't help with or make worse (“Someone hacked grandpa's phone. Now they own his house and a bunch of nerds on the internet said it's his fault and there's nothing he can do.”).

Sure the contract remains unchanged, but who will enforce the contract? In 99 years, will there be any authority that recognizes the blockchain contract? The "biased, corrupt or dissolved" local central authority could choose not to recognize the blockchain contract and then your estate would still not give the land back.

All of those things you list ultimately do require trust.

A trustless ledger documenting that I own the land my house is on, doesn't make me any safer against a government determined to steal my land.

A car lease ultimately requires me to trust that the leasing company is going to abide by their contractual obligations, just as they are trusting that I will abide by mine, and the contract enumerates what happens if either party fails to uphold their obligations, which is ultimately enforced by the court system. A ledger doesn't really change any of that.

etc.

My bank is FDIC insured, so up to $250,000 is guaranteed to come back to me unless the US Government fails, and then the blockchain would probably not work either.

Also, how can crypto not be seized at will? If they want to take your hardware wallet, they can just keep that just the same. Not to mention getting people to give over the keys if it is kept in a centralized exchange, which a lot of people are.

Wills, deeds, leases etc... are worthless on their own, with or without a blockchain. Sure they can be documented on a blockchain, but the blockchain has no ability to enforce the documents in the real world. If your ownership for somethings is on the blockchain, and someone steals it, then proof of ownership does not matter if there are not government agents with guns willing to enforce your ownership. Libertarians always believe this weird non-aggression principle, as if someone with more guns would respect your rights to property. Civil forfeiture only works because the government has the most guns.

A ledger is only useful if the money it points to is actually useful.

>> "we are forced to own nothing and be happy. Bitcoin, Blockchain and crypto solves this."

Serious question, what/where does this apply to? I get NFTs for digital authenticity, but PKI solves this too. How does one "own nothing without blockchain" when we have property deeds, automobile titles, jewelry and fine art certificates of authenticity all without blockchain? Your comment comes off as a solution looking for a problem.

All of those things requires us to trust somebody, which is a glaring single point of failure in the system. Things can go wrong.

When any of these deeds, titles or certificates are lost, burnt or stolen. You have to rely on an outside body to keep a backup safe for you.

Blockchain allows us to be super efficient too. Which is a perk. Rather than the need of waiting for someone to certify, deliver, inspect, notify, return, process. Depending on the industry, this could take years. Blockchain tech allows everyone to see the validity of a claim in real time.

My family sold out family home a few years ago. It took 6 years of unnecessary admin work to get it sold. If we relied on blockchain tech, it would've been processed in a day.

The problem with blockchain implementation is that most of them still rely on us to trust someone. It is not implemented in the distributed self hosted way people think. The top hacker news submission about Web 3 (blockchain) points out that NFTs and other blockchain technologies are centralized and reliant on trusting someone in practice [1][2].

[1] https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845208

This is true. Many NFTs (not all) rely on trusting some random server. People are doing it, but it doesn't make it right. It's a bad business practice.

There are enough reliable methods to not rely on trusting some random server, but some money hungry developers cannot be asked to implement them.

Similar to how some websites do silly things, like storing plain-text passwords in their databases. People do it, but it doesn't make it right.

>If we relied on blockchain tech, it would've been processed in a day.

Why? This is an unsubstantiated claim. Blockchains still have an outside body that you're required to trust, several in fact. The most prominent one is the miners.

I can't tell what the admin issues with your sale were because you didn't mention them, but it seems like being able to see the validity of the claim wasn't the issue that took 6 years for lawyers to resolve. You can show them the validity in person on the day of the sale.

> a solution looking for a problem

This phrase pretty much sums up almost everything related to cryptocurrency/blockchain.

> We live in an age where we are forced to own nothing and be happy. Bitcoin, Blockchain and crypto solves this.

The first part is simply not true (ownership isn't exactly uncommon). Can you specify the problem more precisely and explain how blockchains solve this? I've been following the space since the day Satoshi's manifesto hit HN so please include as many details as possible.

You forgot to explain how

None of those cases, however, had anywhere near as much money put into them that early. It may be that, if blockchain technologies had grown in size much, much slower, that good uses would have been found. Regardless, once this much real money (and the resources of electricity, labor, technical expertise, etc. that they represent) have been invested into something, something impressive should have resulted by now.

How much of that money was based on capitalizing on an unregulated speculative investment market? Just because a lot of resources flow in the general direction of a technology doesn’t mean it wasn’t put to misguided use.

Oh, absolutely. I do think, however, that the very nature of trying to make a new currency (the first and still primary use case for blockchain) is almost inevitably going to have this problem.

Humans are pretty efficient at screwing each other over, particularly when money is involved. And any technology that allows humans to screw each other over more efficiently should have the deepest skepticism possible.

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ has tracked $10B in losses due to grift. And that doesn't include the losses used to pay off ransomware.

Money laundering for good is still money laundering.

I love this interview where David Bowie tries to convince Jeremy Paxman of the value of the internet in 1999!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiK7s_0tGsg

Aviation, photography, and the internet required huge investments in developing and building new hardware and infrastructure. All of that is difficult and takes a lot of time. Bitcoin just requires some not-particularly-novel software, plus either commodity hardware or trivial-to-design custom hardware, plus a shit-ton of electricity to burn.

Actually, I don't think that's true. The military was using planes within a decade of 1900, and certainly a decade after the Kitty Hawk flight, they were installing machine guns on planes. They were proposing international legislation to limit the uses of aircraft in war because everyone saw how impactful it was going to be.

Photography and flying always had obvious practical applications. The problem was that the technology was not quite there yet. As far as I can tell, there isn't any obvious technological problem that's limiting the success of blockchain.