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Comment by Eerie | Hacker News Reader

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Eerie·

These are not global trends, but marginal developments.

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What is the milestone for crypto currencies that allows them to cross from marginal development to internet trend?

Good question. One way to vet this would be to count two things:

1. What percentage of the population uses crypto currency on a regular basis (maybe once a month)

2. What percentage of vendors use it.

That is a B2C view of the world, and might not be correct.

Why marginal? The market capital of the cryptocurrency scene in in the scale of the numbers shown in the presentation [1].

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/

speculation is running rampant, so market caps don't tell you that much. What is more interesting are transactions (e.g. of the non-speculative type), end user products that solve actual problems. I agree that there's a lot of promise in these various Blockchain technologies, but real world impact remains minimal.

I agree about the hype but the technology is based on solid grounds, revolutionary, and evolving beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum. Just look at new stuff like DFINITY [1] and the cryptographic primitives behind it. Since the barrier of entry is null there will be a lot of scams, no doubt about this, but we will see interesting projects arising. Good projects with good leadership have new ways of funding.

[1] https://dfinity.network/

They are indeed global trends by the very definition. You would be hard pressed to find an area besides AI that's experienced more growth than this area, relatively of course.

But of course they don't live up to a B2C trend and so you might be right thats why they aren't in the report.

A growth from 1 to 100 people is 100,000% growth, and still marginal when considering the absolute scale.

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