[simias]

>with all of the scaling solutions in the pipeline

That's a big problem for me, many cryptocurrency/blockchain projects (IOTA, filecoin, the lightning network, basically every ICO ever) are basically saying "sure, this is barely usable as it is, but in the future YOU'LL SEE!"

Given the ridiculous amount of investment in the blockchain/cryptocurrency space these past years how long do we have to wait until we see the actual results? I remember when I first used Google Search all those years ago my first reaction was "uh, that's a weird name", my 2nd reaction was "damn, that's so much better than the search engines I've used so far". How long until we reach this stage with blockchain apps? How many years, how many billions of dollars? I'm not asking for a polished product, just something that makes me think "that's actually better than what I've used before".

>Peepeth.com is creating a decentralized twitter, with IPFS for storage and indexing on the Ethereum blockchain.

Remember Usenet? Remember email? Remember IRC? I think there's a false dichotomy in the mind of many nowadays, mainly that the internet is either centralized or "blockchain based", whatever that means. It's a lie. The internet is fundamentally decentralized, the centralization is a relatively new phenomenon that started in the early '00s.

You want to "fix" the internet? Get people to use IPv6, not the Blockchain.

[berberous]

>> "Given the ridiculous amount of investment in the blockchain/cryptocurrency space these past years how long do we have to wait until we see the actual results?"

This kind of thing is obviously extremely hard to say without any sort of accuracy, but my best guess, within a year or two. Specifically, you will start to see scaling solutions finally launch (lightning network, the numerous ETH initiatives, etc.), and you will start to see some dapps gain actual usage or traction (DEXs, collectibles, etc.).

>> "It's a lie. The internet is fundamentally decentralized, the centralization is a relatively new phenomenon that started in the early '00s."

Yes, obviously there is nothing _technically_ stopping the Internet from being decentralized. But I think what you are missing is the incentive structures and the realities. Here is an interesting post from Chris Dixon arguing that what's unique about cryptocurrencies is that they provide an alternative structure that will encourage decentralized protocols to flourish: https://medium.com/@cdixon/why-decentralization-matters-5e3f.... It's not that Twitter can't be coded to be more decentralized without blockchains. It's that in reality, the economic reality is that such a service eventually closes off its API, bait-and-switching users into their walled garden. Like open source software, cryptocurrencies may be a means of aligning people to work towards a different paradigm.

[simias]

>I think what you are missing is the incentive structures and the realities

Oh I assure you that I'm not. The incentive structure is exactly why we ended up with a centralized web. But as with everything else the blockchain has a lot to say on the matter but not much to show for it.

Currently working in blockchain "stuff" is extremely rewarding because of the massive speculation and deflation surrounding it. You can write a relatively mundane 50 pages "whitepaper" and get millions for it. There's no shortage of "free money". But surely that won't last forever, things are bound to stabilize eventually, one way or an other.

So then what do we have? Those "dapps" are open source, the devs don't control the code, they don't control the storage, they don't control the blockchain. They control nothing. Anybody can come and undercut them with zero effort. That's a feature. Google and Facebook control everything, they control the interface, they control the storage, they control the data, they control how you access all of that. Thanks to this they "offer" you the service "for free" (i.e., for your data). How can blockchain devs ever hope to compete with that? By convincing the general population that they should pay for decentralized services instead of using centralized services "for free"? The very thing they've refused to do time and again for the past 15 years at least?

I'm very much unconvinced that the Blockchain has found a solution to this very complicated problem. It's just wishful thinking IMO.

[ghthor]

Cebtralization as I see it has been mostly pushed by spam and abuse. Email became centralized due to the difficulty in combating spam at scale. The large positive I see with crypto networks is the cost of being a bad actor is magnitudes higher, and now you don't have to be the machine intelligence wizards to fight spam, you can combat it fairly straightforwardly with simple economic hindrances for being a bad actor.

[cocktailpeanuts]

> I remember when I first used Google Search all those years ago my first reaction was "uh, that's a weird name", my 2nd reaction was "damn, that's so much better than the search engines I've used so far".

That's because most "blockchain" apps are no Google. Going with your dotcom analogy, I'm sure most of these are equivalent to pets.com, Yahoo, AOL, etc. which means they will either crash hard or stick around while being marginalized to oblivion by newcomers that have learned from the mistakes and started from scratch (or Bitcoin itself).

And continuing on with Google analogy, this meteoric rise of the hypothetical "Google for blockchain" will happen AFTER the crash of rest of these trash blockchains.

[ericb]

From 1993-1997 the internet had similar potential to what we use it for today, but the websites were roughly the equivalent of business cards. Nothing was real time. You couldn't get theater tickets, or shop, or do much of anything.

[xkarga00]

> Remember Usenet? Remember email? Remember IRC? I think there's a false dichotomy in the mind of many nowadays, mainly that the internet is either centralized or "blockchain based", whatever that means. It's a lie. The internet is fundamentally decentralized, the centralization is a relatively new phenomenon that started in the early '00s.

The internet started in the early 90s so you are talking approximately about two thirds of its lifespan hence "new" doesn't really apply.

[kgwgk]

That may be true for some values of “started”, but symbolics.com was registered as early as 1985. Or maybe you meant early 80s?