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As a counter example to your implication that blockchain enthusiasts are fanatics, I offer my opinion that centralized tech is the right choice in many cases. For context, I'm the organizer of the Silicon Valley Ethereum meetup[1] and am hopeful that blockchains and related distributed technology will have a big impact on society. Many compare the rise of blockchain tech to the rise of the Internet; I think blockchain tech is in the protocol development stage (1970s, maybe 80s), and that it will take 5 to 25 years for the tech to evolve to the point that average person will use it (90s and 2000's).

For context, in the cryptocurrency world, often the word maximalist is used to refer to hardcore tech evangelicals; so there are bitcoin maximalists and blockchain maximalists. Even though I am naturally a skeptic and not a maximalist, I don't want to discourage them. Yes, they're crazy[2]; a part of that craziness is a hope for a better future that I find refreshing.

[1] http://www.meetup.com/EthereumSiliconValley/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rwsuXHA7RA

I see this timeline comparison very often and it seems to me very hand wavy. Sure, it's a nice narrative, but I don't see any real reasons why this 'pattern' from 70s to 00s should repeat itself. We're talking 30 odd years here. That we got here because of a series of logical steps is already quite a statement without extending it to the future! (I borrow Nassim's Black Swan perspective here) In hindsight it's easy to say that this happened because of that, and so on, and I'm not sure this automagically extends to blockchain related things. If we're set on talking about 5 to 25yrs, could you share your vision sans historical comparison? Otherwise, or additionally, could you share your opinion on what the more immediate potential wins of bitcoin/ethereum et al are?

Here's a guess at a timeline

* 1-4 years from now: we have a robust scalable blockchain from someone, maybe Ethereum. This is essential for anything big to follow.

* 2-5 years from now: we get a robust identity and reputation system. Or likely multiple reputation and identity systems

* 3-6 years from now: blockchain tech moves beyond startup and incubator stage with a few widely used apps. Maybe intl money transfer, a decentralized social network, or decentralized AirBnB.

* 10-25 years from now: the things that are referred to in the OP article above by Joseph Lubin occur.

You asked about 'immediate wins'; for Ethereum it is mind-share among developers. At present Ethereum is the place to learn smart contracts and to experiment with code.

Are there really any successes beyond Bitcoin?

(which I would call a qualified success, I think it is handy for a small group of people more than it is really having any impact on society)

IMO It's premature to look for successes at this stage (try 5 years from now), there is a lot that needs to be done in the space (namely in terms of scalability) before it can be ready for general use. Only recently the decentralized storage projects are coming into some sort of Beta (Ethereum's Swarm, Storj, Maidsafe, IPFS, etc..), distributed computing projects such as golem are just getting started, and more work is still in progress to make blockchains more practical, sharding, speed, etc..

How do you measure impact on society?

If you are just holding up a small claim of success to make your grand claim seem less silly the specifics of it don't matter a lot.

Ok! I thought you wanted to talk about it.

I do, but I'm interested in hearing about anything anybody thinks made an impact, not in arguing about what the rules are for making impact.

I think if one person was able to send money to another country without paying much of a fee, then it had an impact.

Turning to your comparison to the rise of the Internet, I think you're misunderstanding why the internet took so long to go mainstream. In the 70s and 80s, almost nobody had the hardware, and when they did, leased lines were outrageously expensive. But anybody who did get connected found immediate utility via email, file transfer, chat, message boards, and games. The software was immediately useful to average people. And that immediate utility was what drove Internet adoption.

I'm glad that you enjoy maximalists, and whatever they do it's certainly no skin off my nose. But you might consider that hype can harm technology adoption. Reasonable people argue that Google Glass's giant smoking crater set AR back. And the hype and crash of the Segway did no favors for the more immediate uses of that technology, like Kamen's wheelchairs.

I'd also point out that however much Jobs sung the praises of the crazy ones in ads, he rarely let hype run ahead of consumer utility for his products. Crazy things stayed in the lab, and were polished until they actually worked for real people. As Jobs said, real artists ship. Personally, I'd love to see more of that ethos from the blockchain world.

That was not my implication. The point is that evangelical fundamentalists occur in may contexts, and that whenever it does, those people should be ignored. Christianity is one of those contexts, and I was explicit that there are other, more reasonable kinds of Christian.

You're assuming or at least implying that everyone in the Blockchain/Decentralization community thinks that Blockchain is the answer to everything which in my experience is not the case.

That's not really what they said though. They explicitly said not every person who is interested in blockchain is behaving like a fundamentalist, but that perhaps people who make the leap from "blockchain works for Bitcoin" to "blockchain is going to change our political system" may be thinking like a fundamentalist.

I would posit that the overwhelming majority of Bitcoin enthusiasts don't think that the blockchain is going to somehow disrupt the massive political machine we have. By nature the problems there are not really technical.

I am neither assuming nor implying that. You are inferring that. Incorrectly, as I was explicit that some Christians are reasonable.

> This was an awful experience, but I learned a valuable lesson. When a group of people have exactly one answer to a problem, it's not even worth engaging with them. Even if they have learned to sound reasonable, their conclusion is predetermined. Evangelical fundamentalists of any sort are a waste of time.

I think you've hit the nail on the head with this one. Cryptocoin communities have reached a religious cult status. Ethereum is a good example of this. It's leaders are seen as infallible and omnipresent. Any criticism or voice of reason are quickly silenced and shunned as "shills for bitcoin".

You are absolutely right that it's impossible to engage in a meaningful dialogue with such people who have such constricted views of reality. It's a waste of time and I'm going to cut it out.

>Ethereum is a good example of this. It's leaders are seen as infallible and omnipresent.

I'm the organizer of the Silicon Valley Ethereum meetup; I.e. I'm very involved in one of the communities that you refer to. We see Ethereum as a very messy, crazy project with fallible leaders. I don't think that the DAO was handled especially gracefully, either in the lead-up to the hack or afterwards with the fork. We've had meetups [1][2] where speakers were very critical of the leadership.

In other words, for the case of our community, we see the developers of the clients and other employees of the foundation (i.e. the leadership) as fallible.

[1] https://www.meetup.com/EthereumSiliconValley/events/23305312...

[2] https://www.meetup.com/EthereumSiliconValley/events/23201229...

> It's leaders are seen as infallible

This line amuses me because I'm definitely a complete convert in the ethereum cult and I genuinely can't think of anything Vitalik has ever said that I don't agree with 100% [1]. but I can't help it, he's genuinely an insightful guy that happens to have sensible positions on most issues.

[1] OK he said some dumb things about quantum computing in 2010 when he was like 16 years old.

Curious to know what aspect of ethereum are you excited about that current solutions aren't addressing?

1. People being able to manage their own universal identity instead of using "Sign in with Facebook"

2. Transparent financial markets on arbitrary derivates (like etherdelta.com)

3. Eventually, people authoring and managing their own content, instead of acting as free labor to generate advertising revenue for Twitter/Facebook/etc

1. https://milagro.apache.org/

2. SEC & IRS will be a roadblock there, eventually.

3. I don't see why blockchain is necessary for that.

I fail to see why ethereum would be the only & best solution here for those cases. I just don't see anything special about it, at best its an unscalable and insecure medium given what we've seen in the past with DAO (now starting another one!) and subsequent editing of blockchain ledger (effectively signaling distributed consensus is not possible with profiteering mixed in).

Milagro is basically a poorly thought out copy of a federated blockchain system. I can't take it seriously as a technology, sorry.

To be fair, in the 1800s some people started saying the answer to everything is "science" and in the 1900s others said the answer to everything is "mass production" and in those cases the people were right and we all live far better lives because of it.

And the people who claimed such things were also the ones who in 1900 said there would be no more multi-national wars.

Will blockchain be a big deal? Maybe. Will it disrupt civilization as we know it. No.

Yes the article doesn't explain what problems with the various parliamentary systems are that block chain will solve.

The problems with hacking of electronic voting Is solved by using paper ballots counted by hand as we do in the UK.

And the problems of entryisam that the GOP has is solvable by OMOV and moving to a modern party system and not the 18th century cabals of rich land owners.

"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"

I don't see how this is remotely relevant. For starters, there is evidence that shared distributed ledgers actually exist.

Ok. I accept you don't see it. Since I posted it, I obviously do see relevancy. Is there some way I can help you?

You don't realize you are conflating the idea that 'people with a hammer see everything as a nail' with 'belief in a power despite evidence of existence will solve all problems?