It feels like the heady days of 1999, where anyone that could was "pivoting" to the web at ridiculous speed and IPO valuation. This isn't a dig on crypto itself though-- after the '00 bubble, it's not like the internet went away. I do wonder what crypto 2.0 will look like, a few years on from its bubble. Here's to hoping the pop comes early and quick, and the real progress can begin in earnest.
However, in '99/'00, even in '94-'96 there were many sorts of things one could say to a friend, "Hey look at this cool thing you can do on the web!" and your friend would say "Wow! Yeah that is cool!"
What are the equivalents with cryptocurrencies/blockchains? I ask this all the time, no one seems to have an answer.
The extent of the discussion around cryptocurrencies seems to be rambling on about things that either, no one understands, few people care about, or as a solution to a "problem" that few people if any, actually have. But people are "really excited" about these obscure curiosities, because if they can get other people about excited too they can sell their holdings for more than they paid for them.
The comparison between the web and cryptocoins seems really strained because not only can you not show the average Joe anything that would really impress him done with a cryptocurrency, beyond an irrational exuberance, but also because the two are so vastly different in scope.
The impetus of bitcoin was about an experiment of enacting a certain type of monetary system related to a certain political philosophy. In comparison the web is basically infinite. You can read about, write about, or discuss that political philosophy, or any of a hundred others, or you can do any of millions of other things having nothing to do with a political philosophy.
One of the great legacies of the web is the dematerialization and demonetization it wrought due to zeroing out reproduction and distribution costs.
Now we have people pretending that code that can be literally copy and pasted to start a new network of ____coin is somehow super wow! valuable!
Yeah, the "wow amazing" factor isn't really there in an obvious way for the innovative pieces of this tech-- blockchain can be useful wherever digitially mediated transactions need to be safe from fraud or attack, but that's not much of an OMG feature for most.
And the currency side, where some advocates like to tout potential societal changes, can't gain critical mass right now with artificial scarcity tied to arbitrary hash difficulty slowing things down.
Right now it feels like the whole thing is a giant flywheel where excitement drives it faster and faster, but there's no escapement to chanel that anywhere. Maybe the better comparison to the dotcom bubble would be if all that overhype had come 30 years earlier when what ultimately became the net was just an oozing nebula developing protocols and eager enthusiasts.
Nah, solutions to that class of problem have been around a while. BFT software for these type of faults are built into airplanes and other critical systems. Its use in blockchain is novel, and interesting, but not a brand new or first solution to obtainin Byzantine Agreement within a system or the associate algorithms involvedinvolved.
What are the equivalents with cryptocurrencies/blockchains?
They aren't nearly as tangible. The big innovation here is the blockchain tech itself -- a distributed, immutable, public ledger. It's a very specific innovation, and it mostly benefits big businesses, but it's an innovation nonetheless.
If you look longer term the 1999 is just a small blip, so what if bitcoin crashes, bitcoin will replace banks, which are crocked and make money out of nothing.
