Despite the limited options and the slowness of my 28k baud modem, the internet in '95 still fulfilled my needs for entertainment, communication and socialization. Blockchain today doesn't fulfill any human needs.
I am more than happy to disagree with that. Bitcoin is a monetary system that is fully independent of any existing financial system, and it's super robust. It's a great hedge against the existing financial system.
It offers permanent, irreversible settlement in under an hour, with payments to anywhere in the world. It offers irreversible logging and time-stamping, in a way that is programmatic and accessible. People are using this today, every day and gaining value out of it.
It's money that you can own without anyone realizing that you have it. Including oppressive governments. It's money that can't be seized. It's money that can't be censored. You balance can't be frozen because PayPal wants to run an investigation, or found some tiny ToS violation.
Bitcoin has a huge amount of value that a lot of people are actively making use of. If you can't see that, it's either because you don't understand, or because you are outside the group of people who benefit from this truly unique money.
It all sounds great, in theory. I'm more interested in how it works out in practice though.
I've gotten refunds for things like plane tickets in bitcoin too. Way easier than setting up bank stuff or proving mailing addresses for checks, or going through the hassle of having them pick your flights, etc.
These are all first world use cases though. I also keep Bitcoin in case of substantial problems. The financial system melting, war, discrimination, or political change that might threaten the life I lead.
It also gives me independence in a way you can't get anywhere else. The US uses it's status as the world's reserve currency to make a lot of political moves. The USD is a huge engine for pushing US agenda. Bitcoin operates outside of that, and this is something I find valuable, and it makes it easier for me to sleep at night.
Which airline refunds via BitCoin?
I assume that's only true for those willing to pay higher transaction fees. Otherwise, it seems the transaction backlog is growing again. 165,00 as of May 12.
http://www.newsbtc.com/2017/05/12/bitcoin-network-backlog-gr...
I keep asking this about Bitcoin, et al. For 6 years I've been getting, "Oh, it's just about to take off! You'll see soon!"
The Internet was definitely delivering value daily by 1990. It wasn't just a technological curiosity. Email, Usenet, mailing lists, file transfer, remote computing: all providing the sort of benefits that let researchers and academics justify paying to connect up.
I think cryptocurrencies and blockchains are technologically neat, and I appreciate them on that level. But neat technology doesn't always end up being useful.
Well you could say the same about Bitcoin as it's current price comes from people willing to buy Bitcoin using their USDs.
If you're buying bitcoin because of some utility it offers you beyond speculation, the price doesn't really matter. You just exchange one monetary denomination for another and do whatever you plan to do with it.
When you buy something like an internet connection or any other good or service you perform a cost benefit analysis. For example, if internet connections were 100x their current price, many fewer people would have one.(And interestingly for a network like the internet, the higher the cost to access, the less users, and thus less useful because of the network effect.)
They created an artificial gold rush so they could sell shovels.
Here you are basically reiterating the metaphor "the blockchain is like the Internet was back in the day". Since that's what I was responding to, I already am familiar with the metaphor. Repeating it doesn't help me.
What I'm saying is that for the metaphor to be useful in terms of evaluating the commercial/societal impact of a technology, I want to see evidence of utility that is similar to what we could see for the early Internet.
So who do you believe the early vanguard is? Who is actually getting value? Who are the people previously isolated from global finance that are now making daily or at least weekly transactions?
I see you're already aware of M-Pesa, which is only a couple of years older than Bitcoin. But M-Pesa has, per CNN, "30 million users in 10 countries and a range of services including international transfers, loans, and health provision. The system processed around 6 billion transactions in 2016 at a peak rate of 529 per second." Bitcoin's numbers are orders of magnitude smaller, and it's my impression that it would be much smaller still if we subtracted the speculative transactions to match what people use M-Pesa for.
That startups exist doesn't prove anything about use. What I'm looking for is traction.
Now, regarding actual demand for blockchain assets (outside of speculation): Previous price rallies in 2016 were most likely caused by the Chinese as a method for capital flight ( http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-02/bitcoin-surges-abov... ). Another recent surge in ethereum prices was caused by more and more ICOs, which use ethereum as way to crowdfund their project. So those two I believe are currently the most important sources of demand: Tax evasion / capital flight and funds raising.
Yes, the Internet was delivering daily value in 1990, but only to a very, very small group of users. I was in grad school then, but the Internet was not a factor in my environment. Networking was carrying floppies from here to there.
Same thing with cryptocurrencies. It's delivering value to a small group of users, though that group is much more than the small group served by the Internet in 1990. Mining and trading in cryptocurrencies have millions for some, so it's serving them well.
The one group I have to admit is getting value from Bitcoin is criminals. E.g., it's the technology of choice for ransomware. But that just doesn't strike me as a use case that will help Bitcoin cross the chasm.
It's certainly possible that Bitcoin is like the Internet was in 1975. But at that point, they hadn't even invented TCP/IP, which came in '82. At that point, ARPANET was just one of many approaches to networking, including BITNET, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet. Not to mention the circuit-switched networks that were probably dominant in revenue terms. It seems totally plausible to me that Bitcoin and/or blockchains could end up as a similar "people used it for a little while but it's hard to remember why" thing.
Or, worse, it could end up like the OSI protocol stack: a collection of exciting ideas that nobody ever really got working to deliver much value in the real world.
I think one of the really good applications of blockchain technology, is to build a system superior to DNS: https://ens.domains/ The names are assigned in automated way, based on the highest bid. The name auction is run by a piece of code (which you can see here: https://github.com/ethereum/ens/blob/master/contracts/HashRe...). All domain name businesses (like Godaddy) could be automated away by a piece of code. That seems powerful to me.