Hacker News Reader

Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

Blockchain is perhaps the most economically important invention of the last 500 years. Right now the whole space is worth less than $100B, and it's going to be worth tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars.

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.

View on HN

> Blockchain is perhaps the most economically important invention of the last 500 years

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. :)

> In early 2017, the Harvard Business Review suggested that blockchain is a foundational technology and thus "has the potential to create new foundations for our economic and social systems." It further observed that while foundational innovations can have enormous impact, "It will take decades for blockchain to seep into our economic and social infrastructure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain

Let me see if I can explain this better.

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.)

> 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

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.)

Vaccines are one of the major reasons we have so many people now (along with germ theory, hand washing, modern medication, etc). The billions of people who lived through childhood, who otherwise might have died, to buy our hardware and use our apps would probably beg to differ. :)

Fair enough. I guess my thinking was that that's not really an arbitrage opportunity in the same way that buying tea in China and selling it in the UK is.

> Weren't really associated with an enormous transfer of wealth on the same level as, say, the railroads or the age of sail.

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?

I'll blog about this in the next few months, I'm going to wait until the hype dies down first though because I don't want to encourage other folks to make bad life decisions, and also so I can buy what I want to hold until the next cycle.

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

> It's about reaching consensus and being able to make decisions at a society-wide level.

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.

This kind of starry eyed delusional exaggeration is why btc/eth/ico, etc. are seen with suspicion in places like HN. Blockchains is an area of active research, they are nowhere near the most important thing in any amount of time, for now they are just promising, time will tell how far they get. But even the marriage of this promise to current early implementations like bitcoin/eth is pure lunacy. People are getting mad on get-rich-quick schemes and price speculation, not on the promise of the technology. At this point we should be starting over every 3 months and dropping and experimenting all over the place, not tying billions of dollars on early adopter versions and spending years in internal wars when the inevitable need for improvement and evolution happens.

For the record I have no position on whether or not the current blockchains will be the winners of the space. When I talk about the transformative potential of blockchain I'm talking about the idea of realtime triple-entry combined with authenticated data and smart contracts, not about BTC or ETH or whatever.

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.

Well then you should be as shocked at the transformation of an exciting research field from a technical pursuit to a den of scammers, con artists and desperately ignorant speculators. That's why you see the attitude you see in HN.

Totally agree that people on HN have become the incumbents who are scared of change and radically new technologies.

>Blockchain is perhaps the most economically important invention of the last 500 years. Right now the whole space is worth less than $100B, and it's going to be worth tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars.

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.

It might be #3 behind the transistor and the internal combustion engine.

What's valuable isn't the transistor and the internal combustion engine themselves per say, but rather the new networks they enable: rail, roads, informations, etc.

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.

Actually the blockchain might be #4, behind the discovery of the concept of atoms and molecules and the resultant birth of modern chemistry in the 1600's.

Those had immediate applications which made new capabilities possible. Blockchains are neat tech but nowhere near that level of impact yet.

Blockchain is just another square on the enterprise bingo game. You know something has jumped the shark when IBM global services starts pushing it.

I wouldn't trust IBM that much, I mean, they just want to be able to say they are working on cutting edge tech to impress some executives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com