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by astoor 1297 days ago
Thirteen years is a very long time in technology. The "problem" with HN is that many of us have been around since the start of cryptocurrency, and have a very deep rather than superficial understanding of the technology. That means we have seen how the cycles work out (start out with something reasonable, e.g. a system for "small casual transactions" in Bitcoin's case, fail to deliver, change promises, fail to deliver, and rinse and repeat, each time with a new generation of greater fools) and understand that each new wave of promises are impossible to deliver for various technical and in some cases non-technical reasons. Unfortunately the current generation of proponents just don't have the depth of experience to understand this, and are blinded by false hope that this is their generation's breakthrough technology, so are doomed to repeat the mistakes of their forebears. FWIW I don't think it'll go to zero or disappear - it satisfies a niche in some human's psyche to try to "get rich quick" with little effort - just like we've had Multi Level Marketing schemes like Mary Kay for decades, and casinos and various forms of gambling for centuries.
1 comments

It's a long time in technology, but that's just the foundation upon which it's built. The industry it's placing itself alongside to compete with is one of the pillars of society, and as such 13 years is a long time to survive in competition, but also a short time in which to create a defendable position.

It took 20 years to go from the car phone suitcase in Lethal Weapon to the first release iPhone.

By the mid-1990s, tens—if not hundreds—of million of people had mobile phone subscriptions, and those who didn’t clearly understood the tech offered humanity a profoundly new ability: communicate anywhere, all the time.

What’s the crypto equivalent?

Estimates I could find online put the number of bitcoin users between 25-150 million.