[bartread]

> Tim is dead on with this observation, this is amazing.

I'm not saying Tim's wrong, but one of the problems that Ive seen a lot - to the point of being tempted to use the word "constantly" - with blockchain is this sort of gushing rhetoric that actually does a really poor job of explaining why it's amazing, and especially of explaining why it's amazing in a few short paragraphs of jargon-free plain English that anyone with technical background can understand.

Again, Tim's post may be right, but it really falls short here and that's a big problem for the perception of blockchain. Until you can get people to understand why it's valuable, without the answer being to go and spend hours reading when there's perhaps no certainty of what you learn being valuable, it's always going to face this scepticism.

It's not helped by the fact that the scammers and the non-scammers talk about it in the same kind of way, so you end up unable to distinguish the real information from the "blockchain doublespeak" - again, certainly without a lot of research. If you're busy you end up developing a heuristic where you file all of this in the mental waste basket.

[TimJRobinson]

You're right, it is hard to explain. That's why I believe long term it's going to be more like AWS - it will be financial plumbing that firms build upon and most end users won't even know they're using it.

I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is really excited about the possibilities.

Then again, a lot of people didn't understand the internet or it's jargon in the 90's, so we'll see how it plays out.

[likeabbas]

> I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is really excited about the possibilities.

The people I've talked to in finance are really excited about Blockchain/DeFi because it's an opportunity for arbitrage in a completely unregulated market.

[oblio]

> You're right, it is hard to explain. That's why I believe long term it's going to be more like AWS - it will be financial plumbing that firms build upon and most end users won't even know they're using it.

It sounds good, but ALL the money needs to be taken out of the ecosystem.

They need to go back to the drawing board and work in silence and fix their core problems: scalability, respecting core financial laws such as AML and KYC, and then they need to present their platform.

The problem with that is that it's fundamental research, making no money, possibly for decades.

Ain't no one got time for that.

[jrek]

Steve Jobs in a university lecture in 1991 (iirc) articulated the vision among him and his industry contemporaries of consumers using thin clients accessing data from the cloud, a reality that took two decades to really come to fruition and that had to wait for infrastructure to catch up - the point being that while some people didn’t see the value of the internet, people in the know were able to simply and quickly articulate beneficial use cases.

[oblio]

Let's drop Steve Jobs as some sort of magic visionary.

If you really want to talk about a true tech visionary, use:

Douglas Engelbart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart

Mother of All Demos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

> The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.

> December 9, <<<1968>>>

1968, not 1991.