Hacker News Reader

> This raises an interesting question - can a new technology ride the hype-train sufficiently long enough to become mainstream and benefit from network effects and ecosystem dynamics kicking in, even if in its best case scenario - it's only a replacement of status quo and not necessarily an improvement? Historically, any widely adopted technological innovation has had the burden to offer and prove incremental value to society to justify paying the transition costs. But here, the incremental value is being pitched as literal "money" to be made by getting in early - which can be hard to resist for your average joe - notwithstanding their passion or stance on the underlying technology.

If the product is self-enrichment, not technology, then when the “technology customer” — who has, invariably, invested money — starts losing money during a bear market, the vendor has a de facto failed core product on their hands in addition to a ruinous reputation from their prior unscrupulous peddling of a technological dud.

There's a huge amount happening in the crypto space beyond NFTs.

The article focuses on that area, which is fine, as they were the flavour of 2021, but it's worth keeping in mind that very few techies in the space saw the NFT hype train coming, Vitalik included: https://twitter.com/VitalikButerin/status/147740467160615321... so it's probably to be expected that a lot of the hacky, centralized fixes pointed out relate to NFTs.

> This raises an interesting question - can a new technology ride the hype-train sufficiently long enough to become mainstream and benefit from network effects and ecosystem dynamics kicking in, even if in its best case scenario - it's only a replacement of status quo and not necessarily an improvement?

That's more or less how Uber works. They just ignored taxi medallion laws, and only ended up winning because everyone decided to abandon them.