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Broadly I agree with the argument that crypto is taking an awful long time to come up with the killer app, but this is not a fair analysis.

Let's be clear: when Google exploded, that was the growth of the Internet in the driver's seat, not demand for Google specifically. Google's growth was a side effect of the exponential growth of the internet because it solved a need where there was no adequate incumbent solution, and where demand for that solution was growing exponentially for reasons basically unrelated to the quality of the solution.

This isn't the case for crypto, because there's an incumbent solution that works fine. More specifically, in our analogy, money is the counterpart of the Internet. Crypto is in the position of needing to slowly sap market share from an incumbent (government fiat) in the same way that, for example, DuckDuckGo does even if you feel it's a superior product.

If Bitcoin was the first-ever instance of money, I assure you its growth profile would look like Google's did.

I think this is less about growth factor and more about "killer app". The killer application of Google is that it actually finds what you are searching for really well (well, it did). That's what set Google apart from other search engines. The killer feature of crypto is...?

DAOs, NFTs, smart contracts, random tokens all seem less like good features and more like transparent scams or terrible ideas that don't work. It's fine if adoption is slow - but there should actually be something beyond Ponzi schemers and hackers stealing from each other. Drugs and tax evasion, sure, but how far does that take you?

What was money's killer app? Bitcoin is money from the ground up. It's going fantastically fast. As for smart contracts, these are the basis of Bitcoin. A permissionless ledger inherently requires smart contracts. Their killer app is a a distributed ledger. There are already a few different contracts that can be made on Bitcoin that allow for different custodial schemes.

What people are selling as far as DAOs, NFTs, and "smart contracts" where they mean are better and more sophisticated than Bitcoin, can all be favorably described as the application of Bitcoin's critique of money to the issuance and governance of other tokens representing other forms of property, and are inherently more complex. Least favorably described, they are scams to boost leverage powered attacks. The middle of the road might be that they're the naive notion that building more complex constructs on top of what Bitcoin defined is immediately achievable without compromising invariants that matter for useful money.

All to say that the "killer app" critique of Bitcoin probably ins't the best lens, and that if it's more complicated than custody and payments, especially for people where that isn't readily available, it's probably further out than is survivable for a single company requiring the kind of trajectory of those that create "apps".

Money's killer app is that it can be exchanged for goods and services and is a standardized unit of exchange. Bitcoin can do that too, albeit slower, less secure against the risks most users face, and less throughput, but the problem Bitcoin has is that anything it can do fiat can do better. Or, if that's not quite true, the things that separate Bitcoin from fiat are trivial or make Bitcoin worse.

Bitcoin is basically a kind of musical chairs for money. People buy in and try to get out and maybe they make money and maybe they lose money. People will play this game, clearly, but that doesn't mean Bitcoin is the future of money anymore than casino chips are the future of money.

>What was money's killer app?

Medium of exchange or rather the division of labor. Bitcoin doesn't do it. In fact, most people who like Bitcoin want it to be a terrible medium of exchange. Everytime you hear people talk about Bitcoin on Reddit there are HODL memes, aka people openly proclaim that they don't want to use the money for anything other than speculating that it goes up in value.

The speculation is on that the alignment of central banks globally is towards savings debasement and non-custodial property. HODL is a rallying call to exit the current monetary infrastructure into the next one, one that specifically allows for a free market for money. Bitcoin is a bet on that transacting with bitcoins will ultimately be cheaper and with a vastly better security model than all existing infrastructure, from the concerns of a nation state down to microtransactions.

They're not speculating that it will go up for no reason. The investment thesis is that it solves real world problems, and that everyone who thinks it doesn't sounds like someone comparing fax machines to the internet in the 90s.

Money is the exclusive right of sovereign states. It, bluntly, cannot exist outside of the jurisdiction of a government. Cryptocurrency is not money.

The DuckDuckGo comparison is a perfect one. The average user has demonstrated they do not care about whatever creepy/evil thing Google is doing that we talk about here. They just want to lookup the hours of a restaurant as quickly, reliably, and easily as possible so they can eat and move on with their lives. Ditto use cases for Twitter, Facebook, etc, etc.

Why (and when) will average users suddenly care "because blockchain"? They don't and won't (the usage numbers reflect this). They just want to get an answer to a question in seconds, Tweet their musings, endlessly scroll pictures on Facebook/Instagram/etc, or watch Youtube videos of cats, glitter bombs, or whatever. For free. As ridiculous as it is to me and most of HN the average person is even willing to have their TV and streaming services show them endless ads. They just like that they bought that 60" TV for $400 on Black Friday.

Even the censorship/de-platforming argument falls flat. It's been demonstrated that people (as a whole), going back to our tribal roots, prefer to engage with like-minded others. It is fundamental human nature and there have been multiple studies conducted that show it's wired in to our reward circuitry.

Trump gets booted off Twitter? Enter Truth, Parler, whatever where many millions of users moved in near record time. When it comes down to it people like echo chambers and they like free. Platform for free speech? Create a Truth account and start wandering in to flame wars that go against the political leanings there. You will get booted just as Trump got booted from Twitter.

This is where I think blockchain and lack of censorship is also fundamentally flawed. They don't want to pay XYZ in some random coin to make a social media post. They also don't want to bump in to child pornography or some other universally objectionable content (in the case of true to the mantra decentralized blockchain platforms without any form of "censorship").

The same argument goes for money. Almost no one cares - they want to swipe their credit card a few times a day and move on with their lives. They do not care about transaction fees, final settlement times, etc. It's invisible. Other than credit cards and cash the average person interacts with more complicated levels of the financial and banking systems a few times in their lives. They do not care if a lifetime of home ownership (as one example) cost them $50 in wire fees. They likely have no idea (and again don't care) how the 401(k) their employer set them up with actually works.

They also don't want to discover that their wallet has been hacked, their exchange collapsed, the value of their money dropped 20% overnight, or any of the other number of ways funds go "poof" with blockchain.

No user has ever said "WOW I need Google search engine in my life right now" they said "WOW I need some gotdang funny cat pics" and google proved a means to resolve that desire.

Similarly, no one will ever say "WOW I need blockchain in my life right now" but they might say "WOW I need to send some money" or "WOW some of my friends are making their money work for them maybe I too should do some speculating" or "WOW I distrust the government's control over the financial system" and blockchain will occasionally prove to scratch that itch.

Correct - no one asked for Google but it provided instant value and utility to anyone walking down the street inside of two years with $2mm.

"WOW I need to send some money". Enter: PayPal, Venmo, Trust Wise, and any number of others.

There are plenty of ways to gamble and speculate without touching blockchain if that's your thing. What's amazing is even a mafia bookie or the shadiest of casinos won't pull a Celsius on you.

Don't trust the government? With blockchain you're expected to completely trust yourself and any number of shady characters in the blockchain space. Clicked the wrong link and your wallet got hacked? Sorry. Forget your seed/passphrase? Sorry. Some defi exchange with a buggy smart contract (as if there are any that don't have bugs)? Sorry. Picked the wrong exchange and the people behind it faked their own death and disappeared with your money? Sorry. The list goes on and on.

Other than the absolute worst and shadiest governments in the world do you trust these factors and actors more? Does anyone else?

> No user has ever said "WOW I need Google search engine in my life right now"

I sure did, and I wasn't alone. I remember thinking the existing search engines were trash long before google came around. The market was starving for a search engine that was user-focused and not 200% bought and paid for by marketers.

Wait, did you describe what Google is currently?

Yep, the launch of Google Plus is pretty much the historic marker where Google turned into everything they originally criticized.

Bitcoin is not a concrete product like Google Search or a smartphone. It's more of an idea, like free speech. The idea being money without a central authority, something that has never really existed before (digitally, at least). No one woke up one day and thought "WOW I need democracy" or "WOW I need free speech". It's abstract and doesn't gratify immediately. The average person does not even have a conception that money could be something entirely different.

Also, Bitcoin threatens the status quo in a massive way. Not only private businesses like banks but also powerful entities like governments and intergovernmental organizations.

Needless to say, I don't expect adoption to be comparable to that of a web search engine.

I use these examples in layers (I have a networking background so my mind more or less thinks in OSI layers).

For actual products bitcoin (and blockchains like Ethereum with EVM) are the fundamental enabling layer. I like to think of them somewhat akin to TCP/IP or even HTTP. Where are the higher layer applications and use cases built on blockchain with instant and obvious utility to the average person walking down the street? This is what I was getting at with the decade plus of development and billions of dollars of investment.

The internet was a fundamental threat to all kinds of institutions - governments with censorship, big media (including state run), and even financial institutions. The internet provided instant untold value for democracy and free speech. Just widespread and instantly available encryption itself was a HUGE problem and threat to governments, law enforcement, militaries, intelligence agencies, etc. Remember the Clipper Chip "debate" and 40 bit encryption export controls? I do.

Yet the obvious value and utility was so clear even governments like China (with the Great Firewall) knew it was of such incredible value to the economy and clamored for by the citizenry they figured out a way to make it work within their system of government. Inside of a decade billions of people were using the internet to further democracy, free speech, and the dissemination of information.

I agree that the Internet's utility is more obvious than Bitcoin. Bitcoin has little or even negative value to authoritarians. Even in more liberal countries, financial sovereignty and privacy are not generally viewed as important. But to me, this is just more reason to believe that the pace of adoption will be slow and gradual.

Bitcoin has very high value for authoritarians. If you can enforce the currency you can enforce wealth inequality and entrenchment of incumbents.

> Bitcoin has very high value for authoritarians.

Then why have almost all authoritarian governments banned Bitcoin?

> If you can enforce the currency you can enforce wealth inequality and entrenchment of incumbents.

That's the whole point. No one can control Bitcoin which is why it's not appealing to authoritarians. Authoritarians don't like things they can't have authority over.

Can you elaborate or add citations? Your claim is possible but so far we have seen the opposite with autocrats, authoritarians, groups who benefit from controlling their own currency.

Bitcoin is an authoritarian’s wet dream as evidenced by the libertarian philosophies of crypto bros and how Bitcoin and crypto have played out.

Showing authoritarian governments don’t like Bitcoin doesn’t help. Western conservatives and CCP’s social views are very similar. Yet they despise one another. Of course. Authoritarians want to be the ones in control. Why would they like other authoritarians?

First, your sentence makes no sense at all. Libertarianism is practically the opposite of authoritarianism. Libertarians are in favor of a small state with limited power. Authoritarians want the opposite.

Second, "Bitcoin being high value to authoritarians" is another way of saying that authoritarians like Bitcoin. There's a lot of evidence that they don't, and for good reason: they can't control it.

Cryptopunk dystopians are libertarian wet dreams as well as crypto bro wet dream.

The opposite of authoritarianism is anarchism. Anarchism and libertarians are not the same thing. One is hard left, the other is hard right. They can’t both be the opposite of authoritarianism.

Libertarians want to be the ones in power. Being in power is something authoritarians enjoy too. I already responded to the authoritarians not liking something does not mean anything about their principles or beliefs.

>The idea being money without a central authority, something that has never really existed before (digitally, at least).

But you still have distributed authorities, the owners of Bitcoin. The idea that one should be controlled by the interests of financial capital is anthitetical to free speech, freedom and self determination.

>Also, Bitcoin threatens the status quo in a massive way. Not only private businesses like banks but also powerful entities like governments and intergovernmental organizations.

It doesn't, it entrenches the status quo. That is quite literally what deflation is, a reward for people who dominated the economy in the past.

> But you still have distributed authorities, the owners of Bitcoin.

What does that mean? That's not how Bitcoin works. There are no distributed authorities. Even miners don't have authority over Bitcoin, other than deciding the order in which transactions get confirmed.

> It doesn't, it entrenches the status quo. That is quite literally what deflation is, a reward for people who dominated the economy in the past.

Even if this was true in a world where Bitcoin is the dominant currency[0], it is not true in the world we live in today. In the world, we live today, governments, corporations, and wealthy individuals are all heavily invested in fiat[1]. I wasn't making the argument that Bitcoin is morally desirable because it disrupts the status quo. I was making the argument that because Bitcoin disrupts the status quo, it will get significant push-back from the powerful entities which have an interest in preserving the status quo.

[0] Apple alone has 200$ billion in fiat, just to give an example.

[1] It's not as if fiat monetary inflation goes directly into the hands of the poor. There's a lot of evidence that the opposite happens and that it actually increases wealth inequality: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

> When will the blockchain ecosystem provide something [...] to the average user?

> Google went from a research project to incorporated and usable on the internet in roughly two years

I don't think this is a fair comparison. Google is a late bloomer, being preceded by lukewarm online services AltaVista, Yahoo!, and AOL. Just like how Facebook became successful when MySpace did not, the latecomer can have a substantial advantage in speed and scale.

Moreover, Google is an application. The Internet is a platform. Google was founded several decades after the Internet. The first few decades of the Internet were clunky, slow, and expensive.

I would compare Bitcoin to the Internet. It is the raw, unsightly engine room that most people should not directly tinker with. Where are the killer applications that will run on top of Bitcoin? We're still figuring that out.

Even if Google is a late bloomer, 13 years didn’t pass since Altavista began. In Bitcoin timeline it was a baby, which seems pretty weird and like a problem.

I don’t see why Bitcoin should be compared to the internet and why Google’s timeline should be compared to the internet vs world wide web.

It is really important to understand that decentralized systems take dramatically longer to upgrade, and thus to mature, than centralized systems.

They also tend to last forever once established: see e-mail.

Aren’t the vast majority of people using corporate email or one of the big handful of email providers? Being mostly a status quo and corporate prop doesn’t seem like an advantage

Even if there were only two, it still gives users choice to leave and take their email with them, especially if they bring their own domain.

Some orgs still self host.

Choice is what matters.

Sure, I’d still posit having a more distributed and less top heavy society is more important than being a status quo of a few oligopolies controlling 90%+ but people can self host

> The "WOW I need this in my life right now" factor is making money through the price of the assets going up. Which you may say is ponzi but the majority of the UK economy seems people making money through assets (housing mostly) going up. I can see younger people saying I can't afford a house but maybe I'll buy some bitcoin or similar maybe that will go up.

I don't know if it falls in the tech category but people play games without knowing there is a blockchain behind it.

which ones

Yeah sending value through the internet without an intermediary that can't be stopped, confiscated or censored is whatever

Maybe the problem is that you lack an understanding of what money should be and what problems banking and fiat have?

I do understand that use case and it has value. Question is - what portion of the 5 billion internet users see that as enough value to enter the space?

I have friends that have fled war torn countries, dictatorships, etc and I'm glad blockchain now exists for that scenario but again - can that use case (fortunately very rare) justify tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars of investment and over 10 years of work?

This is what I don't understand.

I understand banking has problems (fiat is a much longer debate). What needs to be understood is how many of the 5 billion internet users think the benefit of blockchain justifies throwing out the entire financial (and often legal) system and operating in a parallel one? Not to mention the willingness of average people to essentially be their own bank. For this reason alone I think blockchain is a non-starter for the overwhelming majority of internet users.

How many people care? Answer is: a tiny portion. A very optimistic estimate of total blockchain "users" worldwide is in the range of 100m. 13 years and untold billions of dollars of investment to reach 2% adoption of the internet population isn't exactly a success story that speaks well to the utility of the solutions provided and the real world problems they solve.

I would argue the negatives outweigh the positives here:

Tax evasion, money laundering, trafficking, drugs, sanctions evasion etc.

Since the introduction of KYC it's very hard to do any of these in the traditional finance system. And each of them has very serious implications for people's lives.

You must be joking. What exactly has stopped since KYC? Absolutely nothing. The ones doing the laundering are literally the banks/governments/big corps. KYC was just an excuse to increase surveillance

I suppose you want cash and art banned too?

Those are even better money laundering tools than Bitcoin.

> Those are even better money laundering tools than Bitcoin.

How are cash and art better for money laundering than Bitcoin?

“Hey, I will give you this trunk full of cocaine if you make sure to win one of my relatively unknown paintings at the next auction for a least $1m. My friend will bid it up that high for you to take the win. You probably can not resell it for that, but donate it to a museum and take a $1m tax write off for your trouble”

Money spent to buy the art is clean in one shot because art is worth whatever someone pays for it and it is hard for an investigator to prove you didn't simply -really- want that particular painting. Someone showing up to a bitcoin exchange with $1m in BTC trying to convert it to cash is going to invite law enforcement questions about the source of those funds really fast.

Art remains one of the most effective money laundering and tax evasion tools.

Cash is untraceable....? Although Bitcoin will reach that point as well

Cash is traceable in a similar way to Bitcoin. Investigators frequently follow the serial numbers of large bills to track down criminal transactions. Banks even help.

>Maybe the problem is that you lack an understanding of what money should be and what problems banking and fiat have?

I don't believe people are capable of grasping the nature of money. Money is supposed to be a medium of exchange yet everyone wants to turn it into a forced store of value with no consent, that is basically the equivalent of slavery.

Money is supposed to be both. The problem is that money as a store of value is very bad for low quality consumerism

you still need to do kyc to convert to real money, which is essentially the same as transferwise for example