https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/07/chronicle-will-make-you-q...
To put it in perspective, when the internet was 7 years old, the world wide web didn't even really exist beyond a concept yet.
Nobody was pushing the internet to the general public in the 1970s, and hardly anyone saw it as a technology to be used by them anyway. When the technology became cheap enough for the general public in the late 80s, then first did we see experiments aimed at the general users and we got stuff like IRC, email, etc. soon after.
Blockchain technology—in contrast—has been available to the public from day 1 and and so far the record is far poorer then that of the Internet in terms of usefulness.
The web is a network application on the internet.
Blockchain is a network application on the internet.
After 13 years the total number of blockchain users is likely less than 100 million worldwide. From 1993-2006 the web grew to a billion users. In 1993 only 8% of US households had a computer with a modem…
Considering the web, mobile, and social media that blockchain has been able to leverage over the past 13 years it should have at least 20X the number of users.
Blockchain user adoption has been a complete failure up to this point.
I wrote a rant about this earlier this week:
https://blog.cryptostars.is/blockchain-the-most-poorly-adopt...
In terms of replacing the financial system - I've been active in this space for a while now. I've been to meetups, events, large confs, etc in addition to the usual online hangouts. The overwhelmingly majority of users interacting with the blockchain don't know or care about "replacing the financial system". You can tell because they can't go 10 seconds without referencing their investment in dollars (how much they made or lost) or "I 100x'd it" or whatever. There are a few true believers who think in terms of "replacing the financial system" but out the 13% of US households that have anything to do with crypto the vast majority of usage is speculative trading. The blockchain to them is just another ticker symbol someone told them about and they click around in a web interface to buy/sell/trade.
We have a historical example of a new and "innovative" consumer financial product - the credit card. The Diners Club Card was introduced in 1950. By 1970 51% of US households had one. I don't have to tell you that is pretty good adoption for a completely different time and era but when something is immediately and obviously useful people adopt it. Always have, always will.
The first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in the 1850s, and how many decades did it take for international phone calls to be essentially free?
The first road vehicles were unreliable and suffered from poor roads, it took decades for the Model T to arrive.
The first mobile phone was invented in 1973, how long did it take for there to be cell service across most of the world?
So, to answer your question, technologies can be in their "early phases" for quite a long time before they have any meaningful impact.
He gets totally annihilated by Letterman. Bill can't even say a single use-case that is better than what already exists.
Bill mentioned email, and that's better in some ways, they just didn't get into it.
There wasn't in 1995 much that was dramatically valuable for regular folks. The conversation doesn't get into what the potential would be.
This is Bill being reasonable. He comes across as a fair-minded person, not a delusional zealot. He's about the opposite of what crypto-enthusiasts sound like. He doesn't come across as someone making outrageous claims and thus undermining his credibility.
Blockchain does not fit that meaning.
Immutable doesn’t mean, “as long as 51% of miners want it to not change”.
Immutable doesn’t mean, “doesn’t change unless we get hacked and then we’ll change it”.
I could give more examples. Blockchains are not immutable.
I mean, it's pretty easy why blockchains are considered immutable, you can even code one from scratch in Python in less than 200 lines of code.
To control 51% of all those hashing power, an entity would need to power computers that works as much as that, along with paying for the equipment and energy consumption and whatever costs needed for the operation. Current estimates of Bitcoin mining energy usage stands at 71 TeraWatthour, enough to power the whole country of Austria.
Or they'd need to find a way to break SHA256. That's a risk you don't hear much about.
I think it's fairly destructive to just discount new technology based on feeling. It really is a fun technology to learn and the more minds like we see on HN that research the topic, the more likelihood we will have in expanding the usefulness and security of blockchain use-cases.
Bitcoin promised to be a decentralized alternative to fiat currency and failed when it couldn’t scale to be even a tiny fraction of the global transaction. When people tried to improve on the original proposal they also failed at the very same thing while inventing new problems in the mean time. As of yet the only realized potentials of the technology are scams (which were never promised—at least to my knowledge).
Compared to Web 1.0 I think it is pretty safe for you to discount the technology based on a history of scams and failure to realize promised potentials.
You only mentioned BTC but that’s just one coin. Several alt coins (with multi billion market caps) have had 51% attacks including ETC and BSV.
But anyway the original point was that it is literally wrong to say that blockchains are immutable. You didn’t address that point at all, so I guess you agree with it?
If it's illegal to transact with the US under a previous version of this hypothetical blockchain banking technology, that's your 51% right there.
How could blockchain allow legal banking institutions to refuse to follow the law?
Your "we" in the second example is the majority of network users - any network where that isn't true is not decentralized.
You do not know what you are talking about. The fact that grifters often don't know what they are talking about and use that to whip up positive spin on blockchain tech does not give you any good excuse to do the opposite - you are both morons.
So... you’re saying it’s mutable.
Nothing needs an immutable public ledger. Any fraud due to shipping, or banking, or taxes, is a problem of inaccurate entry of data into a ledger, not nefarious changes to what already exists.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_notebook
- https://www.newamerica.org/digital-impact-governance-initiat...
Adjustments needed for shipping, banking, or taxes are trivially accommodated; those are additional events which can be appended to the log.
There seems to be a misunderstanding. The ledger is immutable. That doesn't mean the state is immutable! Immutable state is not very useful. A judge could absolutely order that the ownership of some parcel is changed, but the change will appear as a separate record and everybody will be able to see the change and nobody can credibly deny that the change happened, not even the judge.
If you wanted something to be immutably published you probably want to get it into a major print newspaper; it would be extremely difficult to find and destroy every single copy of the WSJ for 2022-01-28.
Even that is not immutable though, finding and destroying every single copy is possible. Hopefully you agree that it is nice to have the word "immutable". And maybe you agree that most of the times you have called something "immutable" what you have really meant is that mutating it would be extremely expensive.
Historic bitcoin blocks are mutable, but mutating them is very expensive and also has never happened, this seems like a good use-case for the word "immutable".
I assure you I am not. I am simply pointing out the ridiculousness of someone stating that blockchains are immutable when they are changeable and have changed.
In contrast, your example of snatching up every copy of a major print newspaper for a single day has never happened and will never happen.
But blockchains have changed and once regulators and courts get involved, you'll see just how malleable they are.