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Comment by nemild | Hacker News Reader

People in early spaces dream about mainstream use cases (kill credit cards, fix online payments), but killer early use cases are often randomly found. They're the ones most poorly served by the current market.

You need the extreme use cases like reducing the risk of hyper inflation early on, when the product is so raw, much like you might have with the first PC:

> [In the early PC days], Steve Jobs initially pitched the personal computer as a way to store recipes. It took years for the first killer use case, spreadsheets in the guise of VisiCalc, to appear.

https://www.nemil.com/crypto/rationally-irrational.html

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The obvious difference with Jobs' pitch or the breezy nineties hype about the world wide web ("information superhighway" was essentially: "a really big, fast library") is that they undersold the potential, even on the hardware of the time. VisiCalc launched the year after Sequoia invested in Apple...

By contrast, we've been assured that blockchain is going to fix transactions, financial asset storage, security, contract law, corporate governance, fundraising, logistics, bad government and hyperinflations that haven't actually happened and what we've actually got to show for the last decade is speculative assets some people use to make money off other speculators via means which sometimes look suspiciously like hyperinflation and a much smaller number of people to circumvent money transmission laws. (And the problem certainly isn't that we haven't got the hardware to support it or any means for blockchain enthusiasts to connect with other blockchain enthusiasts)

I spend so much of my time on media literacy issues, and one thing I'd be careful of: most of these prognostications you cite should really be considered marketing. They are not thoughtful views of cryptocurrency.

If you're a software developer, I'd really dismiss lots of what you read about new technology, whether it be crypto or MongoDB. Here's my media literacy guide for software engineers:

https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/softwar...

(It's kinda fun to realize that by getting excited about cryptocurrency, I also got excited about the financial incentives behind the media ecosystem)

Also, be careful about throwing the baby (unfounded hype and speculation and charlatanism) with the bathwater (programmable money, open financial systems, digital scarcity).

> babies and bathwater

This reasoning is repeated for every new technology.

"People are using [new thing] for [dangerous, speculative, immoral, hyped, trivial] purposes. Therefore [new thing] [will fail, will ruin civilization, should be banned]."

I've witnessed this way of thinking with laser discs, VHS tapes, personal computers, modems and BBSs, fidonet email, Usenet, Compuserve and AOL, graphical web browsers, mobile phones, the internet, online shopping, video games, strong encryption, Google search, Facebook, ephemeral messaging, cryptocurrencies, machine learning, IoT and bioengineering.

Maybe there were similar arguments about movable type, radio and television, I don't know.

I used to be a Cassandra about new things but I've learned from my mistakes to ask different questions now.

"If I ignore the [dangerous, immoral] uses of [new thing] is there still something worthwhile about it?"

"How might the [hyped, trivial] uses of [new thing] change how we live and become important in the future?"

The bathwater is not that great AFAICT. Scarcity in and of itself isn't that great. I mean technically, sure, blockchains are an interesting if wasteful method of ensuring scarcity and consensus on a public network. But that doesn't mean the end result is all that interesting.

Most of the other 'features' of blockchains are a negative - immutability/irreversibility, for example, or just a step backward in the capabilities provided by the mainstream systems.

> extreme use cases like reducing the risk of hyper inflation

The thing is, you can't test this unless and until you experience hyperinflation of "hard currencies" while at the same time Bitcoin price remains comparatively stable for use in actual transactions. Neither of those conditions has appeared. There is no sign of hyperinflation in the west. Even the turmoil of Brexit pushing the GBP/EUR rate from ~1.4 to ~1.1 over two years made no significant ground-level difference to consumer prices or wages in the UK.

Until then, it's a good way to sell tiger-repelling rocks.

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