> Every era is less educated technically and cares less about ideological or political goals and more about the bottom line of making some wealth.
There is no bygone era of highly educated and high minded people.
There is no bygone era of highly educated and high minded people.
As an example I don’t think Hal would have much interest in shibemoon pump and dump telegram channels and likewise most people joining today don’t have much interest in the implementation details of rootstock.
For example, at the last minute he decided to enter a Gomoku-playing computer programming contest. He learned Gomoku and wrote a program that trashed the competition (including the MIT entry) in a weekend.
Pretty cool that a 'garage-scale' team can make a functioning technolibertarian market so rapidly. (But also helped me learn to appreciate the utility of regulation :-P) IIRC I think Trendon Shavers/pirateat40's "miner financing" ponzi's implosion was a significant factor in taking it down.
There were lots of cool little projects popping up every month. Gambling sites that allowed wagers to be made directly on the blockchain - most engineering was around proving to gamblers that outcome determination was being done fairly. Accountless websites where you'd log in by sending a small fraction of a bitcoin, and your address was used as your identity. When bitcoin was less than $20, it was exciting and easy to experiment with - who cares if the $5 you sent disappears - but then the price spiked, and so fees increased and all of the 'loose change' people had everywhere was suddenly a significant amount of money - exit scams became frequent and people stopped being willing to store small amounts with others, because that small amount could 20x in 4 years.
Lots of small businesses posting that they'd accept bitcoin for their products. Found a lovely beekeeper's business that made great honey caramels and beeswax chapstick. I paid a teenager to custom make perler bead pixel art of Liu Kang and Raiden from the original Mortal Kombat (I think I may have paid multiple bitcoins for those :-P - hope they hodled!)