Comment by bookmarkable | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bookmarkable | Hacker News Reader

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This is really short sighted thinking. The web had no "killer app" in the first 10+ years. It was obscure technology with thousands of naysayers laughing at us "web nerds" because we thought it would change everything.

Cryptocurrency is very young. While its hard to say if BTC or ETH or something yet to be invented will be part of the digital money future, it is absolutely reasonable to expect this technology will have a role in the world. Of course people will make and lose "quick dough" but that's like saying the web failed because some idiot made or lost money on Pets.com or AOL stock.

Trade volume just means that the idea is in circulation, people of many walks of life are seeing what is there. Feel free to ignore those people, but to write off the entire concept as "about making quick dough" is asinine.

Bloomberg and Wired went online 4 years after the invention of the World Wide Web. In the first ten years, Amazon, eBay, Google, and PayPal were all founded. Technology adoption curves have only gotten steeper since then (e.g. iPhone/Android was basically the dominant consumer computing platform 10 years after its introduction).

You are comparing touchscreen mobile phones with a technology delving into what both gold / hard value stores AND cash do for society. That is not a typical technology adoption cycle. I’m not an extremist to say Bitcoin will eat the world or even replace any existing system entirely, but I still disagree with those that say it has no utility beyond get rich quick scheme.

Referencing Wired as the killer app of the early Internet is good comedy. Bloomberg terminals were already connected, just not by this new tech.

M-Pesa was used by over 90% of Kenyan households in about 2 years after its launch. I could go on.

Mobile computing has changed the entire world; it’s not plainly obvious that cryptocurrency would change it even more or is substantially more difficult to execute on.

M-Pesa is very important, society changing financial app/system that did not need iPhone or Android to be dominant. It was built on SMS and why it could achieve such market share. Don't give smartphones credit for putting interfaces on successful technology.

Mobile computing is obviously important, but its importance says zero about the possibility - and that's all I argued - that cryptocurrency could also be very important.

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