Comment by chrispeel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrispeel | Hacker News Reader

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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)

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.

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..

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.

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