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A challenge for the crypto world is that the values of being decentralized and trustworthy seem a bit at odds with the value of rapidly evolving.

If you compare the Amazon or Google of 1999 vs today, they're practically different businesses. Most well-funded, centralized businesses have a hard time evolving at all, let alone to that degree.

Seems like the challenges facing a decentralized organization wanting to evolve would be even larger.

Who are the equivalents of Amazon and Google?

Amazon and Google.

This has been my biggest issue with cultocurrency since it’s inception.

The market cap of the whole lot is made up of maybe 0.04% innovative signing and 99.96% magic beans.

Useful use cases of the smidge of innovation can be exploited by the megacaps to extract whatever actual value there is - this current cesspit of Ponzi schemes will not be required.

That argument was used in the early internet stages too, and hasn’t aged well. Where are printed encyclopaedia or yellow pages or sears these days? All in a pittance of their former self.

The ability to do distributed trusted transactions will change how business is done. How and when is another question.

That argument was not used in the early Internet stages. Even back when it was proprietary bulletin boards solely for use in universities, people were already communicating, and sharing news articles on it. The Web started as an internal CERN project in 1989. In 1993, the code was released to the public and email lists were set up by CERN. In 1994, SCO and Mosaic had already partnered with Pizza Hut to allow ordering Pizza online. Yahoo! and Amazon were both founded in 1994.

https://seclists.org/interesting-people/1994/Aug/57

The arguments against the Internet were not because people thought the technology was useless, but just push-back against grandiose claims that the Internet would solve war, or famine, or education. John Sculley's job was to sell Apple Macs to classrooms, and often said stuff like this:

> Imagine a classroom with a window on all the world's knowledge. Imagine a teacher with the capability to bring to life any image, any sound, any event. Imagine a student with the power to visit any place on earth at any time in history. Imagine a screen that can display in vivid color the inner workings of a cell, the births and deaths of stars, the clashed of aries, and the triumphs of art. And then imagine that you have access to all of this and more by exerting little more effort than simply asking that it appear. It seems like magic even today. Yet the ability to provide this kind of learning environment is within our grasp.

The famous Clifford Stoll article was pushing against rhetoric like that, not against the Internet as a whole.

The point here is that certain new companies will emerge that displace incumbents using the new technology. Amazon almost certainly has always been compared to sears, Walmart etc. sears is bankrupt. Walmart and retailers in general have had stunted growth.

There will be equivalent crypto disrupters that will make incumbents go south.

> There will be equivalent crypto disrupters that will make incumbents go south.

You don't know that.

One of the most interesting things is that Sears shut down its catalog business in 1993, right before Amazon was started.

They could easily have been the dominant e-commerce retailer instead of Amazon, if only they had strategic vision and good management.

But with Amazon, there's a reason they've grown as large as they are. They have a model that produced the world's most successful logistics business. They provide a service that is useful to people.

Now they've produced the world's most successful mainframe computing business by using those massive revenues to build it around the world. A service, that's useful to people.

Is there honestly a single thing any of the current batch of crypto startups actually do that is both useful and better than the status quo? (And I mean useful other than to other magic token gamblers).

Everyone involved is so blinded by moooning gainz that they don't see the emperor has no clothes. It's a Ponzi. The whole market. Ponzi.

If it helps, I'd think that Bitcoin and a couple of others will stick around as smashing good Ponzi schemes for a good long while.

There isn't "disruption" happening "in the space". De-Fi is not novel, it's already been done long before Bitcoin. Many of those companies went to the wall because the counter-party risk is still present even without institutional underwriting. Turns out there's a reason you charge higher interest to less reliable borrowers, even with collateral. Shocker.

And the tragedy of all of it is that this relentless bullshit train, that would have been illegal under the system it's trying to replace, is going to claim another few million victims when Celsius goes tits up later this week and takes every other lender with it.

"Imagine a classroom with a window on all the world's knowledge...a student with the power to visit any place on earth at any time in history. Imagine a screen that can display in vivid color the inner workings of a cell, the births and deaths of stars, the clashed of aries, and the triumphs of art. And then imagine that you have access to all of this and more by exerting little more effort than simply asking that it appear."

This is a literal description of the Internet we take for granted in 2022. If anything it undersells the reality of what we have today, since it misses so many new communication and learning technologies that we couldn't even imagine back then.

It’s easy in hindsight, but I think digital cameras had lower quality initially, and lower capacity, but it was clear that it’s a question of scaling until they replace film. Especially with instant feedback. Similarly early amazon was already useful for what it did.

> The ability to do distributed trusted transactions will change how business is done.

Trusted transactions are already done. The distributed part doesn’t solve a realistic problem in 99.99999% of use-cases. That’s why I think cryptocurrency feels like a solution looking for a problem.

To be fair, digital cameras still aren't close to film in some key ways (but excel in others).

Good quality film stock, even from the 40's, is an incredible artefact owing to it being essentially infinite resolution. Sure, there are artifacts and degradation, but if you get a chance to check out a 4K transfer of something like Casablanca it's really quite mind-blowing. It looks like it was shot this year, albeit in monochrome.

Exactly: Ignore the crap, and look for the Amazons and Googles.

There is so much garbage, but then there are projects like Avalanche. People love to hate on crypto and the stupid puppy coins, but meanwhile, projects like Avalanche are actually running the efficient, performant networks that everyone is shouting will never exist. It takes years to ignore fud and hype and quietly follow the fundamentals.

I feel this with Handshake as well.

What are the must-use applications on Avalanche?

When I first paid for dial-up Internet in 1993, it was pre-web, just clunky text-mode telnet, but the apps were obviously attractive: IRC, email, Usenet, ftp. Talk to anyone in the world, download latest stuff for free!

Same with www a few years later. The dot-com business schemes may have been harebrained but the underlying protocol’s usage was growing exponentially because people couldn’t get enough of the things you could find on the web.

What’s the thing on Avalanche that would keep me coming back every day, like dial-up Internet and web did?

I suspect we're not really at the equivalent of 1993. We may still be back in the early 80s, with people exchanging bang paths and oohing and ahhing when an email goes through. 'Real' applications are thin on the ground, largely driven by novelty, and not particularly visible to the public. In most cases, wide-area networks can't compete with a phone call or a station wagon full of floppy disks. There's a bunch of competing approaches; it's not clear which will win, and surely most will fail, but all have devoted adherents. The important standards and protocols may still be in the future, or are obscured by piles of false leads, mistakes, and outright scams.

The thing is, we now exist in a post-internet environment where people are well aware of the transformative ability of technology. They're all looking for the Next Big Thing in a way that people just weren't in the 70s and 80s. The population of the world has doubled, and the share of those people who are trying to keep up with the cutting edge is _vastly_ higher. On top of that we're talking about a network of value, i.e. money, and so there's inherently money to be made--and it's accessible to the average Joe. All together, you've got the recipe for a blizzard of hype and excitement that obscures the real innovations that underlie it all. And that's unavoidable. Any exciting new technology with the potential to have a serious impact on society is inevitably going to trigger a blizzard of hype--and an equivalent blizzard of skepticism.

That makes the whole process exhausting. Par for the course in 2022.

A lot of 1980s hype technologies fizzled out. Take CD-ROM, which enjoyed crypto-level multi-year hype before anyone even had a player.

None of the companies that invested heavily in CD-ROM were winners. We’re not enjoying our multimedia entertainment on platforms provided by Philips and Sega and Sierra On-Line. There were no Googles or Amazons arising from that massive tech hype cycle.

In twenty years, the notion of “I’ll store value using my cryptocurrency wallet” may sound as anachronistic and outdated as “I’ll enjoy a night home browsing hot multimedia content on a Philips CDi disc.”

I mean, I disagree...I think cryptocurrency is more analogous to packet routing than to some specific piece of media. CD-ROMs in particular were an evolution of physical media that had been around for a century (vinyl record, 8-track, tape, etc) and failed to anticipate the fact that the internet would render them all obsolete (or, to be fair, provided an important bridge between floppy disks and high-speed internet, CD-ROMs were the default for a decade). I'd say they're more analogous to the kludgy way we perform online transactions today, which is complex, country-specific, and crowded by intermediaries.

I do agree "I'll store value using my cryptocurrency wallet" will sound anachronistic, in the same way "I'm going to dial in and log on to my service provider so I can surf the internet superhighway!" sounds quaint today. It'll just be: duh, how else would you do it? With a visa card?

Love this analogy! I've had trouble thinking of things that were "the next big thing" and then fizzled out entirely. This is an excellent example of one!

>Take CD-ROM, which enjoyed crypto-level multi-year hype before anyone even had a player.

Multimedia-enabled applications have been a huge success: it's just that the cost/value curve didn't become a winner until we had the Internet.

The utility of the internet was obvious in its first year.

Bitcoin is in year 14, and emits enough pollution to be a top 20 nation.

How many years will you wait?

When was the internet's "first year"? I think you could make an argument for the very first wide-area networks, ARPANET, or the invention of packet routing. So, 60s to mid-70s.

If you think everybody was on board with the idea of a unified global network that everyday people would use for just about everything in 1970...I don't know what to tell you. That's still an era when the simple idea of a computer in every home seemed ridiculous.

If you're measuring from 1993 or something, see, that's the problem: you'd be measuring from a point when there'd already been plenty of experimentation, thought, and iterations, and it was mature enough for mainstream adoption. It had taken decades to develop IP, TCP, email protocols, HTTP & HTML, etc. You were seeing something like a finished (albeit first-gen) product. And even then there were a bunch of years when it was written off by most people as a gimmicky toy for college kids to waste their time playing MUDs. Most major companies didn't start launching websites until some time after 1996.

I think we're closer to 1980 than 1993 in the cryptocurrency world. But now, like I said, there are millions upon millions of people watching for the Next Big Thing. The audience for the development of the internet in the 70s and 80s was extremely limited: academics and government types, some companies in specific areas, and geeks reading tech magazines in which there might occasionally be a feature article. Now you have people in Kenya and Siberia and Uzbekistan spending their days reading or watching videos endlessly about the newest trends and trying to pick the winners. It's an entirely different environment for tech to develop.

So the hype around cryptocurrency is kind of preposterous relative to the everyday utility. I firmly believe it'll live up to the hype in the end, but we're a long way from that yet.

Or, I dunno, maybe it's all a flash in the pan, and the future really is Visa, Western Union, and SWIFT. We'll see.

> “I’ll enjoy a night home browsing hot multimedia content on a Philips CDi disc.”

Not even some Rick Astley?

Avalanche is probably the biggest disappointment out of the whole bunch. They started out strong with a new consensus algorithm, and then they started hyping 'subnets', which turned out to be plain L1s with artificial restrictions on who can be a validator. Their tokenomics are so skewed in favour of AvaLabs and their early VC backers that they removed the pie chart from their website to conceal it. It's probably the most centralized out of all the wannabe Ethereums, with Emin singlehandedly calling the shots (how much needs to be staked to be a validator, whether subnet validators need to be whitelisted...), and they don't seem to have much of an idea where they're going (they went from bashing L2s and saying subnets are so much better to saying 'let's build L2s, ours will be so much better than Ethereum's'; they still haven't managed to build a bridging solution between subnets and they seem to have given up on that, given that they don't seem capable of competing with the existing interoperability protocols that treat subnets like any other chain, Avalanche-related or not). They also lost an 8-figure sum from the Terra collapse (Emin himself promoted UST after the depeg had started), which does not bode well for an ecosystem where they are still the only truly active entity promoting new projects.

They're more than ripe for replacement by a standalone EVM-compatible chain that takes the only thing that's genuinely innovative about Avalanche, the consensus algorithms, and leaves the rest to the community (ie an actually decentralized project).

> If Bitcoin is the equivalent of Yahoo, what are the equivalents of Amazon and Google?

I’ve been thinking in a similar direction recently. I think it was Doctorow that pointed out the decentralization->centralization progression of the web due to the time lag for big players to understanding the value prop and gradually iterate on their offerings (eg Google taking over email with Gmail).

My guess here is that the centralized systems to learn the lessons from crypto will be the Visa, Mastercard, NACHA, and the Fed. Perhaps we’ll see a smart contract platform built into existing exchanges like NASDAQ.

The blockchain bit will fall away for the most part because the big guys will not actually let the “trustless” system become the seat of power in the economy. And you can build all of the business-facing features without a distributed ledger. (Trivial existence proof - just run a private ETH blockchain and expose a public API for it. This is kind of the Ripple approach here, cutting big deals with existing players.) Reversability and “right to deletion” will trump trustless because most of the actual market participants want the former and not the latter.

Note, I think there is a different analysis for the US, EU etc (with functioning, stable economies with huge financial service industries resisting power shifts) and basket-case economies like Argentina and Zimbabwe. Perhaps the people in Argentina will continue to use blockchain as an alternative financial system in the absence of a long-term stable economy. But I don’t think this will be the outcome in the US.

>The blockchain bit will fall away for the most part because the big guys will not actually let the “trustless” system become the seat of power in the economy.

its not the big guys who forced crypto to adopt a centralised scam coin like Tether. the vast majority of "crypto" transactions happen on centralised exchanges. the "blockchain bit" didnt matter to begin with.

> Reversability and “right to deletion” will trump trustless because most of the actual market participants want the former and not the latter.

Does reversibility actually matter anywhere outside of consumer merchant payments?

If you send a wire transfer, it can't be reversed. If you write a check, you can't reverse it once it's been cashed or deposited. You can ask for a stop payment before a check has cleared, but you can also be accused of check fraud if you ask for a stop payment under the wrong circumstances. Outside of the payments domain: if you buy stock on the stock market, you can't reverse a filled order. You can sell your stock, but you need to sell to a new buyer at a new market price.

Even in the modern fintech space, not all transactions are reversible. A Zelle transaction can't be reversed, for instance:

https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/86920/can-a-zelle-...

All this is to say that true reversibility is only available in certain cases. It is something that financial institutions offer when they know that the funds recipient is a merchant in a captive relationship with a financial institution, where the merchant will most likely be able to fund the reversal by offsetting future unsettled payments that are yet to be reimbursed to the merchant. It works only because merchants are dependent on financial institutions, and do not have the negotiating power to demand instantaneous, final settlement.

I very much doubt that financial institutions will want to (or will even be able to) extend reversibility to other transaction types just so as to deploy it as a strategy to prevent open blockchains from becoming predominant.

I can't find the article right now, but even wire transfers can be reversed under the right circumstances. Reversibility is actually necessary in ~everything under the right circumstances. There is a surprisingly high volume of wire transfer hold-harmless agreement traffic (this is banks agreeing to reverse wire transfers in exchange for transferring the liability if the transfer was not actually bad/fraudulent)

> Does reversibility actually matter anywhere outside of consumer merchant payments?

Yes. For example, the stock markets can reverse a day's trading when it's decreed that there was a flash crash. And in contrast to smart contracts, all business contracts are in some sense reversible in extremis, in that you can go to court and consider the agreed upon intent if there was a typo in the paper, and resolve ambiguities after the fact based on precedent, instead of contract bugs resulting in all of your money getting stolen.

I think we probably agree in that reversibility isn't important in _most cases_ (the mainline happy path), but I think it's really important when you do need it.

> extend reversibility to other transaction types just so as to deploy it as a strategy to prevent open blockchains from becoming predominant

That's not quite the claim I was getting at. Perhaps if I'd said "tighter control, for example being able to implement reversibility and right to deletion” it would be more precise. The core of my claim is not that those two are the killer features; the feature that will cause decentralized options to lose in the end is more generally the control that a centralized entity has over the end-to-end experience. Those two are just prominent examples of the kind of feature that are difficult or impossible to implement on the blockchain, which are actually strongly desirable for the market makers. Another example would be KYC, which is hard to solve at the protocol level.

My overall prognostication here was really that the existing big players will pick and choose the bits of the blockchain systems that are actually innovative and useful (I'd highlight smart-contract execution engines and true API-based transaction instructions for example) while dropping the "distributed" bit to maintain tighter control and enable broader consumer adoption. Analogously to how Google et. al. have transitioned the internet from a distributed/federated "everyone hosts their own server and communicates over protocols" world to a centralized "everyone uses hosted services for everything" world. And consumers seem to prefer the latter, if the FAANG valuations are anything to measure this by!

I work in the stock market, there is dozens of rollbacks a day. Any transaction can be rolled back in the end of the day by the exchange, or the price/size adjusted. Most of the times, the retail user just doesn’t see it.

There is 0 need for non-rollback transactions. Think as a Database, which businesses really want a append-only database? Its so much more work to get it right…

Very interesting. I didn't realize.

Can just any transaction be rolled back, or are there restrictions? Do both parties need to agree to the rollback, or can a rollback be involuntarily imposed on one party by another party?

I imagine there are some circumstances where after a disadvantageous trade one party might claim to have fat-fingered the order, just to try to avoid the repercussions of a mistake that was made with full consent and awareness. I imagine there are cases where if a counter-party were to agree to a such a reversal, it would represent a loss for that counter-party.

How often are trades like this reversed, where one party clearly benefits from the reversal at the expense of the other party, and where the other party would not agree to the reversal if it were in their power to do so? How are these situations arbitrated, if only one of the two parties wants to reverse the trade, and the other party objects?

>If Bitcoin is the equivalent of Yahoo, what are the equivalents of Amazon and Google?

This assumes that there is a Yahoo or Google.

Today I read this article

https://tweakers.net/geek/196920/terug-in-de-tijd-9-dot-comb...

WorldCom was a company that was going to buy Sprint for 129 billion dollars. A few years later it was struck from the corporate history books.

In capitalism things can just evaporate.