[canoebuilder]

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!

[nikanj]

> What are the equivalents with cryptocurrencies/blockchains? I ask this all the time, no one seems to have an answer.

Pay off your mortgage in two years by speculating on bitcoin. It makes most adults go "Wow! Yeah that is cool!"

[vorotato]

you guys know that deflation is bad right?

[ineedasername]

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.

[sillysaurus3]

Bitcoin solved the byzantine generals problem.

That is a brand-new invention. It enables you to achieve distributed consensus in all kinds of problems.

The problem space is vast, and any new solution is worth not underestimating. It's hard to predict the future: http://tlb.org/#predictions

July, 2002: CDs and DVDs compatible with today's will remain the most common way to buy or rent music or video through 2020.

[ineedasername]

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.

[sillysaurus3]

BTC was the first sybil-resistant distributed consensus algorithm in history. Airplanes don't need to worry about sybil attacks.

[UncleMeat]

Neither do most people. Thus, blockchain's limited utility over something like what CT does.

[nerdponx]

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.

[eru]

Git (and similar) had that for ages. The technical innovation is in particular combination of proof-of-work with the hash chain.

But of course the social innovation might have been to make that long established technology cool and popular.