Comment by Jasper_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jasper_ | Hacker News Reader

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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.

"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.

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.

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