I get what you're implying, and while you may not be wrong, this also depends on when you start the clock on the invention...the 'whitepaper' for the car first came out in 1495.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo%27s_self-propelled_ca...
I personally don't make great use of crypto other than some speculations (disclosue, I have made a non-life-altering amount in crypto speculation) but that doesn't mean there aren't interesting, valuable things being done with the technology. I see things like https://atalaprism.io/ that seem really interesting as well as more institutional things like bonds being issued on the blockchain (happening in the EU) as things that have potential to continue adding value.
Also the highest trading volume of NYSE is close to 300 billion in a day. The highest trading volume of crypto is something like 500 billion with some estimates saying 51% of all crypto volume is artificial. That still puts crypto's trading volume peak only ~40 billion off from NYSE trading volume peak. So by that metric alone crypto as a financial instrument is successful.
There’s a lot of conversation in this thread about all of the horrors cars have brought into this world, and I can certainly attest that I’m a person who greatly wishes most cities were modeled like European cities with abundant public transit and walkable neighborhoods.
I also really liked the “hacker” nature of Winton who sounds like an SV developer from the early-mid ‘10s. I miss the days when we just built shit and shared (knowing full well the days when we _really_ just built shit and shared happened like 40 years prior).
Poop. Lots, and lots, and lots of Poop.
Not only that, but to feed those horses, you needed a horse to pull a carriage full of horsebread (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsebread). Those horses that pulled the horsebread into the city also pooped. IIRC, 30% of all traffic was horsebread, supporting the other traffic that was going on.
I guarantee you. A horse has more environmental impact than gasoline. In particular, one-ton of gasoline moves more gasoline than one-ton of horsebread moved horsebread.
Regardless, it still seems like it would’ve been incredible to live in a time where cars didn’t exist, and then they did exist. I have to imagine the next leap like that would be around the time humans couldn’t regularly travel off planet, and then they could. Probably outside of my lifetime.
That's a very odd metric.
The success of the NYSE is its ability to raise money to new (or experienced) companies.
https://www.whitecase.com/insight-our-thinking/global-ipos-m...
That is, NYSE doesn't exist to trade stock. NYSE exists to raise money (and as a side effect, trades stock). Companies who need servers, factories, or other equipment go to NYSE (or Nasdaq, or other exchanges around the world) to IPO (for new companies), or Secondary Offerings (for established companies).
We measure the amount of money raised each quarter in the tens-of-billions. This creates new companies, new factories, new equipment and catapults our economy into the future.
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In many ways, the trading activity is a side-show, just there to enable the raising of new money. (The easier it is to trade stock / exit a position, the more likely people are to buy stock in the first place).
There was a time a few years ago when cryptocoins were trying to be a new grounds for raising money. But that effort failed ("Initial Coin Offerings" are so full of scammers and rug-pullers you'd be an idiot to participate in one today). But even at its peak, it never succeeded at raising money like the NYSE does.
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So now I ask: what value does coin volume have for society? I posit, not much value at all. Its a distinction without much importance.
The other measure of success is maybe transaction-volumes. But this too is under decline. I'm pretty sure "peak cryptocoin" was ~5 years ago when Steam and other webpages tried to use BTC to buy video games, fund microtransactions and other such services. Alas, $50 transaction fees put a dampener on that, especially since video games were $20. It turns out that the system cannot support a large number of transactions.