Gen 1: Bitcoin - general ideas established, mostly a proof of concept
Gen 2: ETH - Building on bitcoin's ideas it establishes the idea of the VM + chain, which transforms bitcoin into essentially a new digital economy.
Gen 3: AVAX/SOL/DOT - ETH with scaling and fixes environmental concerns
AVAX, the chain I develop on, and the one that has the best technology to enable the capabilities required is less than a year old. Solona and Polka Dot are 2 years old.
The stuff i'm talking about is what I would call Gen 5. I think it's pretty unfair to say it's always been "10 years in the future".... a lot of progress has been made, it just might not be apparent if you're not active in the space.
My general metric is when people use something for a purpose other than working on that technology. For example, the web very quickly passed that point very quickly because you had people sharing scientific information, building personal sites, using it for businesses which weren't selling web technologies, etc. where the underlying technology was the vehicle but not the purpose.
There haven't been many examples of that in the blockchain space so far — a few places accepting it in addition to credit card transactions, etc. — but almost all of it has been focused on generating business for various blockchains rather than being better than or even competitive with existing options (e.g. how many NFTs were marketed and priced based on their artistic merits versus “you're going to make a fortune if you buy now!”?). Do you have an good examples of things like that which are actually used by non-cryptocurrency people[1] and have some advantage from using this stack unrelated to selling tokens?
1. The equivalent of, say, the people I helped get online in the mid-90s because they wanted to join hobby forums like photo.net, email relatives, get stock quotes, etc. but weren't really interested in the technology in its own right.
1) they're funding previously biotech companies (e.g. traditional venture not interested because insurance companies won't reimburse hair loss treatments)
2) incentivizing scientists (and other workers) from anywhere in the world to work part time towards these scientific goals
This is only possible due to the token incentive schemes and DAO governance structure. Crypto was never envisaged as a way to improve science, but it's being adopted anyway.
It's worth noting that while it fixes the environmental aspect, it seems to reduce claims made regarding decentralization, wouldn't you agree? If so, one of the core tenants of crypto (arguably /the/ most significant) gets effectively traded off in favor of fixing environmental concerns. I'd imagine that would make non-BC/ETH crypto an unappealing for some as BC/ETH is currently for the environmentally concerned.
I've not heard a convincing argument regarding the ability of PoS, or any of its variations, to prevent centralization in any significant way. Do you have any references you'd recommend?
It's not like Blockchain is the only tech people have been talking about for the last 10 years that hasn't been fully actualized yet. Doesn't mean it's not well on its way.
Saying very smart people work on it doesn't do much to really convince me. Bitcoin's block size isn't a technical debate that requires Very Smart People to solve. It's a social one, about externalities, core beliefs, power structures, and motivations. And those are ones that Very Smart People tend not to make progress on, because they're unable to step outside of their lens of technicalities.
How many of those technologies had no impact for that long but then went on to be significantly useful? The only examples which come to mind are things like mRNA vaccines which had far more development & approval hurdles, which is a pretty different situation from systems which are globally available but generally just haven't found a niche where they're a good fit and affordable.