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Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

> All of which still fails to add up to anything actually working and useful, 15 years in.

The first packet switched network came online in 1969. Fifteen years by 1984 almost all the use cases were hobby, and it'd be another ten years before the Internet really started changing life.

Decentralized consensus is a fundamentally new computing primitive, similar to packet switched networks. Developing applications on top of new primitives is hard and long, and there will be a lot of time required just to build out usable infrastructure.

Turing complete smart contracts are only 7 years old. Layer 2 scaling is only two years old. Decentralized exchanges and other on-chain financial contracts about four years old.

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Except with packet switching networks I can immediately point to the problem they are solving and can also make a guess how things will change when we create 000s of bigger and better ones. And the timeline is definitely not what you are making up here - the 70s had immense development of networks and protocols, every telco was building new networks across the country, it was most certainly not hobby stuff, there just weren't that many computers until the 80s.

What problem are we solving with decentralized consensus? How will things improve if we have a giant one? Say every mobile phone was a part of the consensus mechanism, churning Turing-complete smart contracts. Billions of nodes. What do we get out of that?

> The first packet switched network came online in 1969. Fifteen years by 1984 almost all the use cases were hobby, and it'd be another ten years before the Internet really started changing life.

By 1980 CompuServe had thousands of paying subscribers, both home and business - and I suspect they'd invested far less getting there than the amount of VC money that's gone into cryptocurrency. You can say the home users were "hobbyists", but they were getting real value out of the network; online chat or games might not have had a clear business purpose, but they were fun, and that's real value.

I've seen literally one niche for cryptocurrency that people seemed to actually enjoy for its own sake rather than as a crime tool or get rich quick scheme, cryptokitties, and that seems to have proven itself fundamentally unviable (either your collectibles are too cheap to be interesting, or they're too expensive to be fun). Cryptocurrency is not merely wildly unprofitable to date, it's not generating value and there is no indication that it ever will generate value.

This is comically ahistorical

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