As a preamble, I think all current mainstream cryptocurrency implementations are scams (by intent or ignorance). And I see no evidence the technology is going anywhere other than more rebrands to confuse people and steal more money.
However, the article misses something I think by conflating "early internet" with early technical and gaming application rather than "early e-commerce" or something a bit broader.
There was a time when is was not clear why a company would have a website, online presence, or web store, there were lots of failures by people that didn't get it, and lots of naysayers calling bullshit on why companies all wanted to be "on the internet". Turns out there were lots of good reasons.
Crypto is not the same in that it's basically 100% scam at this point, and the cycle is much tighter (as in all tech) between ideas and attempted exploitation. But it is the same in that there are some underlying concepts that get people excited but don't have any real use yet. They probably won't, but in 1997 it was probably pointless for companies to invest in building websites.
> all current mainstream cryptocurrency implementations are scams
There are some non-mainstream ones though that provide genuine innovations while not allowing its creators any financial rewards (the latter can itself be seen as an innovation).
Bitcoin has been around 13 years, but smart contracts only 7, and DeFi only around 4 years. Institutional-quality MPC wallets have been around less than two years.
Smart contracts are called triggers and automated workflows in other contexts. They have been around for decades. The crypto-world innovation, if you can call it that, is removing the possibility of undoing or reversing the action, and the misguided idea that programmers can write code that works reliably all the time, otherwise known as hubris.
Yes, Vitalik has proposed calling smart contracts “persistent scripts” instead. It’s the trustless execution on-chain that makes them unique to other programs.
Whether or not they existed in other forms doesn’t change the argument that they are unique to crypto as of roughly 7 years ago and have made a huge impact on the ecosystem.
A huge impact in terms of discovering bugs and getting hacked, with no recourse. Everything is “unique to crypto” because the “community” reinvents the wheel and gives it a cool-sounding name. Everything has a huge impact because the ecosystem is both volatile and fragile.
How are “persistent scripts” different from any other code? Transient scripts aren’t very useful.
“Trustless” is a meaningless buzzword. Anyone using the script trusts the developer and the people who control the blockchain it runs on. I think the history of Ethereum shows how that works out.
> The Ethereum network forked after an incident in July 2016. At that time, attackers exploited flaws in the smart contract code of a prominent application running on Ethereum called The DAO. In response to community concerns, the Ethereum Foundation implemented a hard fork to roll back all DAO-related transactions and allow the DAO's original contributors to reclaim their funds.
I trust my bank and its persistent database triggers and scripts far more than I trust the clown car of amateurs running Etehereum. Pretending that something is innovative doesn’t make it so.
However, the article misses something I think by conflating "early internet" with early technical and gaming application rather than "early e-commerce" or something a bit broader.
There was a time when is was not clear why a company would have a website, online presence, or web store, there were lots of failures by people that didn't get it, and lots of naysayers calling bullshit on why companies all wanted to be "on the internet". Turns out there were lots of good reasons.
Crypto is not the same in that it's basically 100% scam at this point, and the cycle is much tighter (as in all tech) between ideas and attempted exploitation. But it is the same in that there are some underlying concepts that get people excited but don't have any real use yet. They probably won't, but in 1997 it was probably pointless for companies to invest in building websites.
Tldr, anything is possible