«We're in the early phases of it»
I've been hearing this for years now.
How long can something stay in early phases ?
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.
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.
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.