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Comment by pedrocr | Hacker News Reader

The blockchain hype seems to have some parallels to the Second Life[1] one. The technology isn't quite there, the valuations are immense, and it all seems like a real life implementation of a Neal Stephenson novel. Second Life doesn't seem to have gone anywhere but it doesn't mean cryptocurrencies won't as well. From the outside they do look just as niche and generally lacking in use cases.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life

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Second life is as far as I am aware actually profitable.

Right, as far as I'm aware, no one ever has made any money from Bitcoin, and its 1000s of % increases in less than a year.

Here, be aware of myself, who used cryptocurrency as a means to pay off student loans.

>Right, as far as I'm aware, no one ever has made any money from Bitcoin

what about people who bought low and sold high? im sure there's at least 1 person who did that. or are you talking about making money from holding bitcoin?

I made quite a lot from bitcoin so far.

I think he was being sarcastic

Your observations are more due to how humans adopt new technology (speculation, early adoption, etc.) than because of similarities between Second Life and blockchain technology. Second Life has very limited utility; it's a video game. Blockchains are the result of protocols that could be used to do work.

Second Life is a virtual world where virtual stuff can be traded.

Blockchain technology is real world technology. It can help to solve really challenging problems and make real world systems more efficient / productive / cost effective / autonomous.

The two are in no way comparable... if you're looking for a comparison to Second Life which happens to use blockchain technology, check out Decentraland: https://decentraland.org/

Bitcoin is no more real life than Second Life is -- both exist in our reality just the same. Virtual goods in second life are no more virtual than bitcoins are -- both are just bits on some hard drives that people agreed to be worth something. There are significant differences between Bitcoin and Second Life, the lack of centralized control in the former being the biggest, but they aren't what you described in your comment.

> Bitcoin is no more real life than Second Life is

Not a big fan of bitcoin here, but there is a difference which I don't think it's captured by that "lack of centralized control". And it is that bitcoins exist as some sort of mathematical object, that is guaranteed in its working and will exist forever as long as there are people mining the blockchain.

They remind me a bit of the ever expanding, mathematically deterministic Autoverse in Egan's Permutation City, for those who have read the novel.

There nothing mathematical about guarantees for bitcoins continuing existence — it really boils down to the social contract between miners that agree to use the same set of rules. See for example the result of the Dao hack in Ethereum world — if there really was any mathematical guarantee to Eth smart contracts, you’d imagine you couldn’t simply revert them by updating the software. The parallel to Egan’s dust theory is interesting, but only valid as long as someone is actually mining blocks using old clients nobody cares about in the long forgotten forks of the chain, which doesn’t really happen.

You're making the virtual/real world dichotomy with the hindsight of knowing that Second Life didn't go anywhere. People back then also called it a technology: it's a technology that allows e.g. in-person meetings without the need for displacement. It's a technology that disrupts physical space, the ultimate disruption!

No, sorry, such dichotomy is irrelevant. What's relevant is that Second Life didn't get traction.

How's Bitcoin doing as a technology? Lots of traction! Now it remains to be seen where it can keep it. What applications does it have? I'm not sure, as right now there's some 250k backlogged transactions because currently the blockchain can't seem to handle even a trivial number of transactions.

Blockchains reached a valuation of $0.5 trillion and attracted all the biggest financial institutions (Goldman Sachs yesterday). Second Life traction never got even a fraction of that. Also Blockchain growth has been going for 9 years now, Second Life growth lasted 3 years (http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/11/why_...).

Have goldman made another announcement or are they still just acting as a clearning house for futures?

> Blockchains reached a valuation of $0.5 trillion and attracted all the biggest financial institutions (Goldman Sachs yesterday)

You know how bubbles work, right? What I mean is that what you've described is compatible with the "bubble" hypothesis just as it is compatible with the "disruption" hypothesis. I need to see the thing solving problems to believe the thing.

This is just me though, I'm not trying to convince you. The point I meant to make in my previous post was not a case for/against Bitcoin, but against the idea that "Bitcoin is nothing like Second life". It is in some important sense: there is a reasonable case for both and it's still too early (now for Bitcoin as at the time for SL) whether they can deliver on their promises of disruption.

EDIT: But if you want to talk about the credibility of Bitcoin, I notice you didn't respond to my observation. I don't care if it's $0.5tr or $500tr: there's still a backlog of 250k transactions. The thing is unusable right now. Now, this might be solved, yes. But right now it's a serious concern. Do you not agree?

I'm wondering how usable they actually are for normal people in stable countries. They have shown to work very well for darknet markets and things like that but I wonder if there really is a use case for most people.

I live in Sweden and I can buy something from the US in minutes over the Internet and the fees are pretty reasonable. Would a crypto currency have any advantage over the current situation?

There definitely was a virtual world craze, with tons of VC money, the like of IBM investing, and Second Life clones popping up left, right and middle. Putting "Virtual World" in your pitch was a near-guarantee of raising funds. Gartner was predicting that "80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A "Second Life" in the Virtual World by the End of 2011" [1]

And yet here we are.

It's easy to dismiss in hindsight. If crypto-currencies turn out a fad it will have been so easy to predict that people will wonder how anyone could be tricked into buying. And if it eventually succeed, people will wonder why anyone could be this stupid not to have invested, since success was so obvious.

[1] https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/503861

Oddly enough I discovered recently that SL still has an ongoing userbase, and a smallish economy of people selling each other models, tools, clothing and various other bits and pieces.

I'm sure the userbase has dropped off massively since the hype phase, and I'd be surprised if anyone's making millions from SL "Real" estate any more, but it seems to still have its niche.

I wonder if ten years down the line BTC will have found a niche like that, where it ticks along unremarkably, just being used rather than hyped.

> Lots of traction!

If by traction you mean massive, wild speculation. If by "traction" you mean "shipped a functional product that does something for the mainstream", bitcoin has a long way to go. In fact, Bitcoin's flaws are so deep and unfixable it will never see non-speculatie mainstream adoption, period. Same with pretty much the entire crypto "space".

You're just in the middle of being disrupted with whats called a black and white swan event.

I assume you mean just “black swan”? I was curious about the white swan bit - maybe it was an orthogonal concept? But I settled on the regular kind.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory

They might mean a swan that is black on one side but white on the other, i.e. gives the appearance of being an extremely rare or a very common event, while in fact being the opposite.

Surely that's even more rare than a black swan?

Lol

Ironically, a black swan isn't really at all - just unknown. Which really is Taleb's point: black swans aren't as rare as they are priced to be.

Bitcoin might be exactly like second life . Without second life we wouldn’t have World of Warcraft , Eve online and every other MMO. I can’t wait until blockchain becomes corporate !

Erm, MMOs predated Second Life by many years. Even discounting MUDs and so forth, Ultima Online was around about 5 or 6 years before Second Life.

and SHADES which used to run on the UK's PRESTEL system

EverQuest, Ultima Online? You have your history backwards

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