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Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

> You are basically saying "these GNU people only produce things that are interesting for people into software stuff. Don't give me a C compiler, give me Visicalc."

Yes we are. Yes, we re saying that. Because Unix was announced outside Bell Labs in 1973, and VisiCalc's first release was in 1979. It wasn't released on Unix, but that's really beside the point. Two years later it was available for basically any consumer system in existence.

And on top of that there was a wealth of other software available on those systems. For example, vi and emacs are both from 1976.

What you are saying is that "well, bitcoin paper is from 2008 (14 years ago), smart contracts are from 2014 (7 years ago), and we still have nothing even resembling VisiCalc, scratch that, we don't even have an equivalent of emacs or vi, `it's still early boohoo`"

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Visicalc was not free software. Unix is from the 70's, but Linux 1.0 is from 1994.

The point is not just in having an application, the point is in having an application created under the new paradigm.

> Visicalc was not free software... but Linux 1.0 is from 1994.

Goalposts: shifted.

The shift itself is also extremely funny because web3's entire premise is: "you pay for everything"

> The point is not just in having an application, the point is in having an application created under the new paradigm.

So, where are they? Where's web3's VisiCalc (1979), emacs (1976), vi (1976)? Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos was in 1968 [1].

Oh, I know the answer. "Bitcoin paper was 14 years ago, smart contracts first proposed over 30 years ago, appeared on Ethereum 7 years ago, but it's still early for this new paradigm because Visicalc, Unix erm Linux, muble mumble"

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

> Goalposts: shifted.

Not at all. It was you and OP who asked for some kind of "killer app" from web3 as a way to justify its existence. My response is to say that this is an absurd ask.

Not only is absurd, it already exists, you just prefer to ignore it. I may agree that Bitcoin as a currency is a failed experiment, there is no denying that the possibility of sending value across borders is the killer app already.

"Oh, but BTC is volatile!". Yes, but I could in 2011 send money from the US to Brazil instantly without going through any international bank (buy in US exchange with USD, sell it in Brazilian exchanges in BRL, wire from the exchange to my brazilian bank) with minimal exposure to BTC volatility and at a lower cost than the fees charged by the banks.

But I am sure you want to ignore that, or find a reason to say that "it doesn't count". I can not fight your own prejudices.

> Not at all. It was you and OP who asked for some kind of "killer app" from web3. My response is to say that this is an absurd ask.

No. Your response is literally "you wouldn't ask Unix people to create VisiCalc instead of compilers", but they did, to which you responded "but it isn't free".

> it already exists, you just prefer to ignore it. I may agree that Bitcoin as a currency is a failed experiment, there is no denying that the possibility of sending value across borders is the killer app already.

You mean, the thing that people have been doing since the invention of borders is the killer app?

> But I am sure you want to ignore that

No, I'm not ignoring that. And the reason it doesn't count because original question was about web3, and if all web3 has to offer is sending money across borders, it's not web3, it's Western Union 2.0.

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