Easiest Path to Riches on the Web? An Initial Coin Offering
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There is a huge amount of instantly-deployable capital in Ethereum and Bitcoin, held by individuals now seeking ways to put it to work. Many technologists will naturally make use of this energy, but so will BS artists and people under the influence of hubris.
I am making this appeal because it is irresponsible to stand by and watch so much financial energy be directed at projects without appropriate constraint. Many firms funded by ICOs (or soon to be) have qualified leaders and developers and are developing great ideas, but IMO many are also raising too much money for their own good.
What may be needed to guide these rockets to their full potential are maturity, mentorship, and the careful application of jurisprudence and principles of accounting.
The sentiment on HN is that ICO promoters/startups are all scammer. My company, Pipeline Network is going to launch our ICO soon. We would be more than happy to get some guide/mentorship from the YC community.
Calling them all scams will not stop the next ICO from getting bigger. Note to blockchain-denialists: there are 10s of billions of capital, a deep enough pool for thousands of ICOs.
Slinging mud will also not help make ICOs any safer, nor protect financial systems outside of blockchains from collateral damage should firms fail.
In which way is this different that "regular" crowd funding, which doesn't have as bad a reputation as ICO ?
Personally, i'd rather raise "real money", than cyrptocurrencies. The reason why it's easier for those companies to raise millions through cryptocurrencies than regular money raising tools, is probably because there's a bubble.
I seriously doubt the ICO market is going to be ready for prime time until a few years from now.
But yeah, the whole concept is stupid and the only reason it is getting any traction is because the traditional financial system is just as bad, and there is way to much free cash in the hands of "investors" who can't even tie their own shoe laces.
No, there aren't. Real money has never been cheaper than it is now. Never in human history. USD, Euros, JPY, etc. Super cheaper. Low single digits to borrow. Anyone doing an 'ICO' is trying to cash out at your expense, big time.
As strange as it sounds, this is indeed the case.
The cost of money is measured in $ per $ (or actually currency per currency) which is a percentage also known as interest rate.
There are no known records of any time in history where interest rates were negative. Sure, only banks can "get" these but they will do and hand them to the next by investing in his asset.
- Government spending/borrowing bubble
- Education Loans bubble
- Housing bubble (at least in CA, but also worldwide to some degree)
- Bit coin, Ethereum, Coin bubble
- Stock market looks a bit frothy too - all the leading technical indicators show things won't be too rosy for the next 10 years.
Did I miss any?
Ponzi? No. Unregulated gambling? Of course.
Sign me up!
For example, a project called Status (http://status.im/) recently held an ICO in which people were tripping over themselves to buy Status's coins. It actually backed up the Ethereum network for several hours with pending transactions and they raised over $100 million USD worth of Ethereum (at the time). See if you can find on their website a description of what the coins are actually used for. I can't!
Something about permanent storage and security (regarding Ethereum usage).
What if it turns out te SEC issues a statement saying that all these ICOs were illegal because they were selling unregistered securities?
Does ex post facto apply here?
Can any lawyers chime in for those of us who are thinking about ICOs?
OTOH, if it's just an existing statutory definition that the SEC looks at and says that this new thing fits into it, then there is no change in definition. Prosecutions might proceed based on the exosting definition based on acts before the SEC applied that definition to the acts in question, though it would be a question for the court whether the existing definition was being applied correctly.
I am not going to express an opinion, at this time, on whether any securities laws apply to ICOs in either way (either clear inclusion one existing statutory definitions or areas that are, under statute, open to regulatory action.)
The hard part has always been getting it out and not getting caught.
Nothing is truly yours.
Courts have centuries of case law for how to deal with people that hide assets from judgements. They're not going to care whether your assets are in a shell company or a cryptocurrency.
Where they are much better than a hole in the ground is when it comes to moving your assets to a different jurisdiction. As long as you can physically get yourself from Somecountry to Othercountry, all your e-cash will be accessible in Othercountry regardless of what Somecountry may have to say about it. And even if Somecountry imprisons you, you can still hand over your e-cash to someone else with a single message.
I can't think of any asset that offers that particular advantage.
You also can only pull this trick once: after you are a known flight risk the next country to come after you will be careful to make sure your detainment comes as a surprise.
Finally, as much fun as it can be to game out, for how many people in the world is this use case actually applicable?
Think instead of an ordinary person fleeing a disintegrating economy and/or an oppressive regime, who had stashed away some e-cash for such an eventuality.
It's also possible that the government may declare some bills invalid (what happened in India with larger bills). Also, government could inflate away your wealth by printing more currency.
You make mistake of assuming that countries won't put up a global firewall that makes bitcoin/ether network impossible to operate. If China can filter traffic at internet scale, crippling Bitcoin network even if say EU/US/China are on board is trivial.
Currencies are backed by the only thing that matters, its will/trust of the people. And no amount of crypto changes that. Unless of course you have some magical way of baking silicon on your own into processors and other chips used in computers and networking equipment in your backyard.
Bitcoin/Ether barely register in terms of the total economic activity (75 Billion $). With significant fraction unusable. They will either be tamed or destroyed.
In fact another way of looking at cryptocurrencies is as a revolt against the Visa/MasterCard duo-poly & regulations that has made digital transactions too difficult. The moment digital transactions become cheaper/more-efficient, the allure of crypto-currencies will disappear.
As for the allure of cryptocurrency, only time will tell. I predict they will continue to grow in prominence.
Except for drugs, contraband, money laundering, and evading capital controls. Which, from day one, has been the entire actual value of these things and remains so.
That's a reasonably big business to be sure, but it will always remain a niche element and always be under fire, for obvious reasons.
Plus as more avenues for directly using bitcoins opens up, the 'getting it out' problem becomes a non-issue. Plus, mixers!
People forget that, for that money to have any value, you eventually have to interact with the rest of human society. As another commenter said, we've been dealing with this for centuries--black markets, cartels, smugglers, etc. Everything old is new again.
Beyond that, if we're speculating, a world where all transactions live on a blockchain is an ideal one for a government bent on tyrannical control of the economy. It is likely that governments of the future will have advanced methods of associating wallet activity with real-life activity, especially for citizens who intend to interact with the larger law-abiding economy (if you ask me, blockchain money is the ideal currency for a tyrant). Of course, you can just continue to speculate about future crpytocurrencies that will solve all these issues and that is the reason why this type of speculation gets us nowhere.
Yet. Everything needs to start somewhere.
Eventually, someone asks the question, "Why can I buy weed with Bitcoin, but not pizza and chips?" And delivery of munchies is a legit business that can be advertised. Once recognized as a viable model, it can then be poached by major corporate players as part of a local pilot program, which can then be rolled out to larger jurisdictions.
The problem, as usual, isn't that you can't buy anything with it--it's that you can't buy everything with it. As long as you can't pay your electric bill with cryptocoins, the business that accepts one as payment can't also pay its employees with that same cryptocoin.
Honestly, would you even apply to a job posting if it said salary to be paid exclusively in Floopcoins?
And in Europe one already can pay electric bill and pizza with crypto. While only few utilities already accept them directly, many more enterprises want to establish themselves on this emerging market by mediating these transactions.
Better yet, I'll get you a printer and you can print me some transferable bills.
LocalEthereum.com is being developed too.
I would advise not storing anything having to do with your Ethereum private keys in a Github repo.
Real cash is much more anonymous than stupid blockchains where every single transaction is published globally for all time.
You are right the web is tracked so even if Monero itself has untraceable transactions, buying Xmr generally requires an exchange which in turn kyc.
Wait - does that mean you could literally get off on a technicality?
If expensive ugly paintings are not a Ponzi scheme, then cryptocurrencies are not a Ponzi scheme.
Even if all of those beliefs above were true, it still wouldn't be a Ponzi scheme. As someone else posted in here, Ponzi Scheme has a fairly specific definition which "Gold" doesn't meet.
Even if all of those beliefs above were true, it still wouldn't be a Ponzi scheme. As someone else posted in here, Ponzi Scheme has a fairly specific definition which "[Cryptocurrency]" doesn't meet.
[1] https://ethereum.stackexchange.com/questions/3/what-is-meant...
On the other hand, it is not likely you can deploy some magic oil machine in your closet with almost 0 investments and start producing $5c / barrel oil.
There's no way an economy can be defined by something of no practical value.
... I get the other advantages to Ethereum, but it's not Bitcoin where there is actually a distributed number of people managing it.
Are you sure you're talking about Ethereum, and not Ripple? The vast majority of ether is not controlled by one company.
I'll suggest that the difference isn't that people know the details of how for example checks clear, few non-experts learn all the details, BUT virtually everyone knows where to go if there is a problem (bank branch). Most non-experts at this point in crypto currency would have no idea where to even go to investigate a problem.
You can redeem them for the privilege of operating a legally distinct incorporated business entity in the US.
At a strictly technical level, I believe it may still be possible to live your life entirely lawfully, without being taxed, but the amount of legal analysis necessary to work out exactly how that may be accomplished is beyond me. It's far easier to just earn enough dollars, and then pay up.
(Note that relying on Supreme Court opinions will not get you to anywhere you might want to be if the IRS decides you need to pay them.)
You have a right to vote, so levying a tax upon the act of voting is not permissible. Obviously, if it is a right, it means that even someone with zero money should be able to do it, and you can't pay a tax if you have zero money. The tax prevents poor people from fully exercising their rights.
As such, taxes that appear to be on the exercise of a right are usually worded such that they are actually excises on a legal privilege that is suspiciously similar, or upon an accessory privilege, without which the exercise of the right is largely pointless.
You can build as many steel mills as you want on your own property. But doing so is pointless if you cannot transport the steel over public roads or sell it to customers in the public marketplace, unless you have a great need for vast quantities of steel on your own property. There are quite a lot of foil-hat-wearers out there that try to tease out the line of separation between taxable privileges and untaxable rights, but the reality is that none of their opinions hold any sway unless they have millions of dollars to spend on lawyers and lobbyists, or millions of supporters to march on the capital. As such, a lot of "Sovereign Citizen" propaganda revolves around the insane idea that a state with near unlimited power may be compelled to obey its own laws, even when doing so would be contrary to its own interests.
This is the same phenomenon that results in your tabletop RPG's resident rules lawyer getting their characters killed off. For any obscure rule they can argue to their own advantage, the GM can always just roll behind a screen and say, "Oh dear, the goblin scored a critical hit. What an unlucky occurrence. Your character dies. Again."
For instance, the Supreme Court has also ruled that it is permissible to prevent someone from growing a crop on their own property, never to be exported off of that property, because that satisfies some demand that would otherwise impact prices in interstate commerce. Essentially, the state said it can prevent you from growing corn in your garden, because that means you won't buy as much corn--which could be imported from another state--at the grocery store. In order for that ruling to be consistent with the poll tax opinion, the US cannot recognize that engaging in commerce and providing for your own livelihood is a natural right. Because that would mean it couldn't be taxed, and the government needs those taxes more than you need to buy your own food and shelter.
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that many of the things you may call "legal right" are probably just legal privileges, and that if something is taxed, the government does not recognize that you have a right to have it or do it. This is disturbing to some people, because it provides a practical test to unequivocally show that they have far fewer rights recognized by law than they believe themselves to have.
It is quite rare in history that a fiat currency was put in place, that didn't have a corresponding broad based tax in order to enforce its use and give the issuer, usually a sovereign or government, an advantage in being the source of the fiat.
Bitcoin matches this definition exactly since pumping up the currency is not connected to any real world productive activity.
Ethereum has some theoretical practical uses but most of the ICO nonsense is pure Ponzi.
Defining a Ponzi can be difficult because in order for something to truly be a Ponzi scheme it must be engaged in with fraudulent intent.
Really stupid people who "invest" in really stupid things and waste their money on useless stupid activity don't count as a Ponzi because they don't have fraudulent intent. They are just really stupid.
Whatever participants in digital currencies are not in the first category are in the second category so it isn't much to be excited about.
The way to tell your understanding is wrong is that it would describe every currency, and every possible asset (land, valuables, etc).
You are buying the currency, once you receive it the contract with the coin's creators is fulfilled, you are not an investor, you do not own any shares of any company. It is a one-way transaction.
Perhaps you meant pyramid scheme, of which ICOs are also not an example.
If the power has shifted to an elite who controls the great majority of the currency, and has the power to withdraw/dump coins (basicaly influencing the supply side of the market, and control the value) - I'm pretty sure there are people/organizations who invested into such positions - and have the power to simulate value and draw people into this gold rush...
Where is the line drawn between this and a scam/fraud?
Is it when the control party withdraws all the value from it and dumps it?
For as long as everything is being valued in a positive way, everything is fine?
I'm sure if you wen't to them then and said here is money plz give share they would have considered it. Everybody want's to have gotten into the big giants when they were small - but there are many small cap/penny stock companies you can invest in now ... yet people don't. There are even non listed share trading options. And the reason is because hindsight is 20/20 ... it takes experienced and diligent investors to make good investments that beat the market - it's exceptionally rare.
ICOs are not like getting into Amazon/Facebook/etc early. It's like penny stocks or worse. Could it pay out big ? Sure ... why not. So can the lottery. But there is no enforcement on any of these things in the real world, no shareholder rights and no protections.
> People put up lot of BS project and they got funded, in time these kind of project will fail on there own.
People keep funding these BS projects and loosing their money though. Let's not pretend nobody is loosing, and I'm actually pretty sure with kick-starter garbage most of the time nobody is winning.
> For once, the small guy can participate in this market.
I'm not sure what market you think you were excluded from, but I doubt this was the case.
> You had to have the connection and access .. here the little guy in columbia or Africa has the same access to such a deal
... this is just wrong.
The main reason why your line of thinking is flawed is - most cases if you know the people to a point where you trust them to invest in them - you will be covered under Reg D affilated investor - and in other cases you probbably would not invest anyway.
Further, so far I have yet to see a practical example where crypto actually acts as shares - with the same protections (but via smart contracts or whatever). So while maybe one day, so far it has not delivered on this promise.
Your basically happy that at the moment crypto allows you to do exceptionally stupid things with your "money".
Replace the word "token" with the word "equity" in the previous sentence and it would still be true.
You want them interpreted at best as as in game currency or at worst as gift cards.
The only problem with the idea of tokens as "gift cards" or "in game currency" is that it restricts the conceptual range of possibilities of what a token can really do. It's an assumption to think they NEED to function that way, because they definitely don't have to. Better to think of the blockchain tech from first principles.
If Amazon were to decide to set up some kind of coin product it wouldn't really work unless it were backed by something internal. So it's perfectly feasible that some kind of blockchain product the guys at Amazon come up with necessitates a token and this coin would certainly be correlated to the future of that one product's success, but as a company because they've already had an IPO and trade publicly what's the incentive to adopt a coin for the whole pie?
It's definitely not a case of blockchain-all-the-things (although that can be almost impossible to see just by glancing into the ICO space).
You mean just like after the 1929 stock market crash we just improved stock trading? Or after dotcom crash we became more serious about evaluating usefulness of services? Or after various mortgage issues we introduced controls for known issues?
I feel like it's similar to any other huge system. There are issues with it. We prevent some behaviours and provide incentives for others. We don't lose faith in stock market and burn it to the ground.
By definition, they are not ponzi schemes. None of your claims are obvious, and implying otherwise is disingenuous.
>But we better find out what the future is before they start converting the gullible masses to a currency that is less secure in many ways that is swept under the rug.
Ah yes the "gullible masses", and the wise men and women who know better.
How about we respect other people as adults who have a right to buy whatever they want with their own money and stop trying to treat them like sheep that need to be protected from their own gullibility. Your presumptions of knowing what's best for them, to the point where you'd like them to be denied the option of buying them, are extremely condescending.
So, it doesn't meet the technical definition of a very specific type of financial fraud, therefore everything is hunky dory?
There has to be more background to this? Why would they ever bother building the service if they have the 14M in cash?
It's imaginary money, still, or I'm sure they would cash out.
As for why they would take investors' money (not really investors according to the SEC) and actually build their product? Maybe they value keeping their promises, or their dream is to build this product and the $14mm is just a means to that end.
"Imaginary" in the sense that it's unrealized in the currency in which it's described, exchangeable only if there are enough people willing to pay the market rate at the moment. "Unrealized" may be better than "imaginary", that's a fair criticism. So it wasn't $14m USD, it was ETH whose market value at the time of calculating was potentially $14m.
To pay employees or themselves I'd also bet they cashed out a slice. I'd love to see a tracker for % of ETH raised at ICO and subsequently sold off. I wouldn't be surprised if the recent flash crash[1] was an ICO selloff.
[1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-21/ethereum-flash-cras...
Will a non-nation state be able to generate enough credibility to run their own currency that lasts a lifetime?
I don't know be I think it's interesting to watch.
And if they do, it may force central banks into a corner by limiting their ability to print money (i.e., lowering the value of your currency by printing money will cause people to move their money to the alternative currency, leaving you with inflation).
(I'm only half joking)
I don't think Amazon is planning on a standing army or navy yet, however
I am imagining the following scenario:
Someone has some vested shares in a startup. They send proof of their shares to some administrators of this hypothetical service. The shares are then listed on the website. Someone browses the website and decides that they like the company, and they want to invest $10k. They make a request on the site, and then transfer $10k worth of Bitcoins to a specific address. The Bitcoins are then transferred to the person with the shares.
When the company has an acquisition or an IPO, the person then buys $X worth of bitcoins, and sends them to an address, where they are distributed among the investors.
This would be highly illegal, no? Something that would have to operate on the darknet? So then why are people getting away with ICOs?
P.S. As you might be able to tell from my username, I've been trying to figure out a way to sell some of my shares in a private company. (They're a unicorn in Silicon Valley.) You could call it an options contract. Or you could call it a loan, that would be repaid if/when the company has an exit. I've tried using a secondary market service, but the company blocked the sale.
P.P.S. This is completely unrelated to any of the above, but feel free to send me $20k worth of Bitcoins or Ethereum. I could even send you a link to my LinkedIn profile. But of course, this would just be $20k with no strings attached. But who knows, you might receive some bitcoins in the future.
I don't see how your scheme falls into either category. I advise checking with a lawyer before doing anything.
It's complicated and a very gray area right now. In response to this gray-ness, ICO's are now requiring investors to declare that they are not from the USA and some are geoblocking USA residents.
Obviously this means nothing, if a US citizen wants to buy they still will, but it is an interesting case of Cover Your Ass From the SEC taken by the ICO companies.
Seems like a serious unintended consequence of regulation.
I recall from angel funding that the criteria is that you must ask, and that you must have "no reasonable reason to doubt" that a person is an accredited investor. The language is nice and vague, as per SEC regulatory standards.
On the other hand, provided wishing wells and ICOs don't claim to be a genuine investment and aren't considered to be equivalent to securities by anyone with any common sense, it's arguably state overreach to stop people chucking their money into them.
Yes, it's not easy and not for everyone, but people in these countries go through enormous risk and effort to accomplish economic freedom.
Umm no easier than raising funds for any other venture, in fact probably more difficult and I would think a lot of that money is coming from people who were already made rich by other coin like bitcoin. Easy come, easy go, but enjoy the gravy train while you are riding it.
That's why it is easier. You have a bunch of gamblers who have gotten lucky on one bet thinking they are now master investors. They have seen a few ICOs pop so they are willing to take a punt on any that come through pretty much even if it makes no sense.
But in the current climate a 0% return seems, at least for now, unlikely....
(In the interests of even-handedness: Preston J Byrne, quoted in the article, is worth listening to, especially if you are by nature inclined to be a true believer when it comes to this kind of thing. Relevant thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14573875)
In addition many governments try to move citizens to "electronic payment" (ranging from online banking to NFC credit cards). The reason is once again tracking, and as could be seen during the financial crisis it's easy to just confiscate money when it's just numbers in a mainframe vs actual piles of cash in my home safe.
They encourage it. I like to think of ethereum as a ponzi scheme which spawns ponzi schemes (some of which themselves are intending to be a new platform for generating currencies...)
See e.g: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/25/books/nothing-but-zzzz-bes...
You can get a code template from here:
These people will pay a premium that warrants delivery.
It was never that. Yes Webvan failed, but Peapod didn't. Grocery chains also started their own delivery services which are still around today, and the industry slowly grew from there.
Judging an entire market by looking at the failure of one failed startup is not smart.
ICOs are not the micro-investing many would like to see and the use of a special tokens distinct from ETH is rather contrived.
That said, if people are willing to throw money at it, so be it. But the amounts are quite frankly insane.
It's a token representing ownership.
Also, I believe of lot of crypto currency is purchased in China as protection for them, and a truthfully a get rich scheme.
You don't think the same economic policies that have driven all other asset values through the roof is also impacting cryptocurrency?
On the flipside, btc usually goes up when gold goes up, and gold goes up in recessions. They might bounce back as an alternative store of value not dependent on the general economies functioning.
That's why I think a recession will be the defining time for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Do they become more valuable in rocky economic times, like gold? Or do they plummet like any other speculative asset or high flying stock? The answer might depend on the severity of the recession and any associated turmoil.
Would they be saving on transaction costs?
I believe most of the money that is ending up in Bitcoin exchanges is laundered in the first place. Also, there is a whole lot more that is getting laundered everyday than Bitcoin being mined. That would mean Bitcoin will keep going up in value. Gold should correspondingly fall.
Do you have any evidence for that because I'd say that is almost certainly blatantly false.
It's like if we were to print different banknotes for different services; suddenly we have blue Advertising Dollars, red Server Time dollars, yellow Financial Transaction dollars, and none can be used for anything else.
To me this looks like an arbitrary level of complication, the only true winner from which is whoever runs the exchanges.
Sounds fitting, huh?
Basically, a new form of fast finance has emerged, connected with a blockchain technology which enables the financing mechanism as well as potential applications that are financed. It is not monopoly money as much as it is speculative vendor financing.
It's massively parallel, with smaller hash-producers/stakers having nearly the same profitability as large ones, and nearly no minimum investment required to enter.
This is diametrically opposed to any central banking scheme, which is extremely hierarchical, with the representatives of regional banks sitting alongside high-ranking political appointees to create monetary policy and make decisions as significant as buying a trillion dollars worth of privately owned assets from large privately owned financial institutions.
The current centralized monetary scheme is the reason 42% of corporate profits since 1972 have been earned by the financial sector.
>decks out Monopoly money with a bunch of smart-sounding technological bells and whistles
...ephemeral hyper-velocity funny money!
> Pretty much what the central banks are doing around the world.
Exactly. So why choose the currency of a couple of dudes over the central bank's one? Show me an ethical cryptocurrency with equal opportunities for everyone and no taxes in a form of pre-mining, decreasing block rewards & other stuff like that and I'll be the first one to use it.
Obviously valuations have far outpaced the present usefulness of these technologies, but because the pie is so enormous it would be irrational not to overpay. Right now prices are too out-of-whack with reality so it's inevitable that there will be a correction, but it's entirely understandable why this is happening.
It's sad though that most people on HN have now apparently become the older generation representing the entrenched interests, rather than being the disruptors.
Blockchain is also a new network, and the math for analyzing its value is the same as the math for analyzing the value of any other network. In this case I would say that it's going to be the most valuable new network since the rise of global shipping during the age of sail.
That could eventually turn out to be true. But that's not inconsistent with all these new coins that pop-up from nowhere being problematic.
Holy cow are you serious? The most economically important in the last 500 years?
So the steamship, the airplane, the automobile, the railroad, the telephone, the printing press, nuclear power, vaccinations, electricity, radio, radar, the semiconductor, television, the cell phone, penicillin, the Gregorian calendar, pasteurization, the refrigerator, the microscope, the telescope, electric lighting, the transistor, the Internet, the microprocessor, and pretty much everything that makes modern life possible is somehow less important than the block chain?
Even is you limit this to just banking, you have widespread checking, credit cards, credit reporting, interbank transfers, wire transfers, mortgage lending, and more. And the blockchain is more important than all of those?
I get it. *coins are cool, but it has a LONG way to go to even be in the in the same league as the greatest inventions of the last 500 years. Let's reasses this in 50 years or so and see where we are before declaring blockchains more important than penicillin. :)
500 years ago was 1517. This is just a bit into the Age of Discovery. We hadn't even managed to sail all the way around the world yet (that wouldn't come until 1522). The Enlightenment was still a couple centuries away. Feudalism was still a thing, plagues still routinely struck. Absolute monarchs reigned over lands. Most people still lived on subsistence agriculture and would starve is there was a bad harvest. People routinely died of things that we don't even think about because of modern medicine.
Now, compare that to the world we live in now, where satellites and cables beam information around the world in milliseconds and childhood deaths from diseases are much rarer now. I could be in China in less than a day if I wanted to. And I'm not likely to starve this winter and I never had smallpox as a child.
Blockchains MAY someday be important. But it is the height of tech arrogance, not to mention a gross lack of awareness of history, to put a yet largely unproven technology that most of the human population has not even heard of on the same level as vaccinations. A LOT has happened in 500 years, and it is WAY too early to be making those kinds of pronouncements.
(As a side note, two of the most underrated inventions of, let's say the last 100 years or so: the pallet and the ISO container. Both of these are so crucial to the modern economy that they blend into the background.)
I said 'economically important'. The couple years they add to our life expectancy is great, but vaccines weren't really associated with an enormous transfer of wealth on the same level as, say, the railroads or the age of sail. (And wouldn't have even if Salk had patented the polio vaccine.)
How do you predict wealth will transfer differently under blockchains than with usual state backed currencies. Not the literal (you don't need a bank), but societal?
If block chains were to completely replace US currency, but society used them exactly the same, then they wouldn't be a transformative tech. They'd need to change society economically to do that. How do you see it doing that?
What I would say though is that blockchain has nothing to do with currency, that's just a red herring out there to trick people into not seeing its transformative potential. It's about reaching consensus and being able to make decisions at a society-wide level. I blogged about the implications of this is a little in 2006, before any of this was even invented: http://www.alexkrupp.com/fourwebs.html
If this was really true, I could see how important that would be. Having better ways to govern ourselves, and putting 35% of GDP to better use than it currently is being used, would have tremendous impact. But, the Government and the majority will never in a million years allow this to happen and thus none of this "consensus" will ever matter (because it occurs outside the scope of our operating government). The real key to achieving what your alluding too is a massive political innovation which I don't see how bitcoin can bring about.
Clearly this stuff needs another 5 - 10 years until it's ready for mass adoption, and requires lots of new mathematics and technologies that haven't even been invented yet.