[22289d]

> "You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it."

Crypto still hasn't figured this out. The entire focus is on how to get people using the technology.

If you start out being completely unwilling to use a database, that should be a red flag you're falling into this trap.

Would a blockchain be better than a db for some ideas? Sure. But for many it wont be and if you're a) using a blockchain where a db would be better or b) searching for stuff to build in the small sliver of ideas where a blockchain is the right tech - you're not starting with the customer.

[musicale]

Jobs importantly said the customer experience.

Remember Jobs also famously said:

“Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

[philliphaydon]

My previous job we had an amazing product owner. He never caved to customers demands. He always listened to them and deciphered what they actually wanted. He took 1 customers demands and figured out what everybody wanted. And every time we released a feature we got great feedback and praise.

I remember one customer said “wow this so much better than what we asked for!”

When he left it was all down hill. Because the product owners just wanted to pad their resume. Pump out features. And pretend like they cared about the product but ultimately the product got worse. To the point they started adding old features back in that they had removed thinking they knew better.

[adolph]

The structure of the above comment almost sounds as if it were in opposition to the parent quote. It is important to note that the two quotes are in harmony with one another.

Delivering something of value to those who didn’t even know it was needed is part of what has made Apple very successful. The technologist’s perspective may be “no wireless, less space than Nomad” but the improved focus on consumer experience and perception isn’t ”merely marketing,” it’s market making.

[vba616]

This seems like dangerous advice if taken as "ignore customers".

Someone else said you should never believe customers who tell you what they want, but you should always pay close attention to what customers do.

The latter is a type of market research, isn't it?

[grecy]

I think Jobs quoted Gretzky more than once too:

"Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been" - Wayne Gretzky

[roeles]

Alan Kay has explained this quote a bit, which I thought was insightful.

It's not about tracking the Puck. It's about seeing the big picture and positioning yourself such that it will be passed to you.

[grecy]

I think it's also about designing and selling a touch-screen phone when nobody knew they wanted one instead of making a slightly better phone with buttons.

[theodric]

Not nobody. I had a touchscreen phone for years before the iPhone appeared. All Windows Mobile platform, but there were Palm devices at the same time. The iPhone improved usability and stability, and its capacitive touch surface was a vast improvement over even the best resistive screens, but it was by no means at the vanguard. Its marketing was, though.

[theshrike79]

Nokia had world firsts in a ton of categories, but they - as an organisation - sucked at vertical integration. Thus many of the features just were there, without any way to actually use them.

I remember my old Nokia phone having a feature that would detect people around me + my location and would change profiles accordingly. Something that Apple added around iOS 16.

The Nokia feature? It never worked, nobody knew how to make it work. It needed some mystical configuration that people in my company didn't know how to do. And I worked for a major Nokia subcontractor...

[projektfu]

Better for responsiveness and appearance, but the accuracy of a good screen like on an iPAQ is still not matched without very special hardware.

[hk1337]

> If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'

Oddly, enough that’s what he ended up doing. We even describe the power of the engine in horsepower. Granted it’s not a 1:1 translation to an actual horse.

[vba616]

There were a lot of Ford models before the model T, as you might guess if you heard that they started with "A" and went through the alphabet (skipping some).

More than one of them really looked like a "horseless carriage". For example: https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digita...

That apparently came to an end after the model T.

And Ford's first car company failed.

Maybe you could draw a parallel between Steve Jobs and his "second act".

[1ark]

I think crypto just conveniently bypasses securities laws, that's the point, can't do that with a centralized db. It is sort of decentralized and you can issue tokens in different ways, and as the creator you "happened" to be an early adopter or have a foundation that got 10% of all supply.

[vkou]

The way most people use crypto to bypass securities laws is through exchanges, though, and regulators don't care if your exchange operates a centralized or a decentralized db. They will sanction you regardless.

(Also, all exchanges[1] use centralized dbs.)

[1] Except maybe FTX, it didn't seem much into bookkeeping of any sort.

[cypress66]

Bitcoin did "figure that out". You're referring I think to cashgrabs that slap the Blockchain term to try to milk some money.

Bitcoin originates from a concrete customer experience issue: lack of digital money with some cash like properties (non reversible, pseudonymous, trustless, etc). [1]

Something like that had been tried to create a few times before, but Blockchain was the first solution to that problem. In other words bitcoin solved a problem looking for a solution, not the other way around.

That being said, crypto UX has a LOT to improve. But let's not confuse projects that use "blockchain" because some manager thought it was cool, or literal cashgrabs, with actual crypto projects.

[1] You may think those properties aren't good or useful, but there clearly was and is people that find that useful, so let's not beat the dead horse with that debate.

[22289d]

I was referring mostly to Ethereum and all of the smart contract chains and dapps that it spawned. I would agree what I said doesn't really apply to Bitcoin.

[philliphaydon]

Money is already digital, it’s not backed by gold or paper ledger, it’s stored digitally and used digitally on a daily basis.

Crypto currency is decentralised digital currency.

[throw101010]

While you address crypto in general I would suggest that instead you go at the root of it: Bitcoin. The "customer" issue is well identified there, cash was already poised to disappear and any form for peer-to-peer exchange of value with a currency will eventually go with it. CBDCs will replace this, whether we like it or not and the writings of this have been on the walls for a long time. If you don't think this is true please observe countries which are well on their way to become cashless like Sweden or even China.

The idea "for the customer" of Bitcoin is to provided them with a digital alternative currency, an opt-in one, not mandated or controlled by a state. The previous attempts like Digicash, E-gold and few others all had the same fate and lasted very short periods of time because they did not combine a strong and independently verifiable data structure with a way to truely be the basis and incentive of a decentralized P2P network.

Bitcoin solved these issues by taking the best of many of the preceding failed experiments. This implies some compromises that apparently make you think it's unsuitable technology applied to a problem that could so easily be solved with a simple database... but that would be misidentifying the issue it is trying to solve, maybe you are not the current "customer" for it (yet), maybe you don't care about P2P transactions without intermediaries, that cannot be censored... but when (note: it isn't an "if") your government will tell you that you cannot pay for x or y with their CBDC which will be the only currency you will be allowed to earn/spend, then maybe you will rethink this position. And the minor inconvenience of Bitcoin will seem suddenly more acceptable (hopefully by that time progress like the Lightning Network will have ironed these out).

And again, do not take my word for it, observe the cases where Bitcoin has already been used and useful under oppressive regimes and in war times.

[IAmGraydon]

Precisely. Crypto is a solution in search of a problem.

[Mistletoe]

It solves a problem that you don't realize is here yet, just like people in France didn't understand it was here yet and Rome and Weimar Germany...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assignat

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

[philliphaydon]

It doesn’t solve anything. Currency used to be backed by gold. There was always a fallback value of currency in the form of gold.

Crypto falls back on the US dollar. If the US dollar collapses. As too does Bitcoin. And there is nothing in place to prevent this.

[Retric]

Crypto is in no way backed by the dollar. That would imply you could always trade Crypto for some minimum number of dollars after a crash. But as has been demonstrated repeatedly coins can and go to 0$.

[philliphaydon]

Sure, coins can crash and turn to dust. But it doesn't change the fact its value is determined by the dollar. If the dollar crashes, bitcoin has 0 value. No one buys and sells in bitcoin so bitcoin has no real value at the end of the day. It solves no problem.

[Retric]

People buy and sell crypto in other currencies. It’s possible for the dollar to crash without destroying crypto, though it seems unlikely for the dollar to crash without severe global issues that would likely take down crypto as well.

[22289d]

That's an interesting hypothesis - though one that is far from fact, that many would disagree with, and which has never been tested. As such, you might want to avoid fallaciously stating it as a certainty.

[colechristensen]

The things blockchain is good at don’t get attention because people who hate crypto hate on everything and people who like crypto think the things are boring, which they are.

Blockchain isn’t good for some society disrupting change of finance… it’s a specialized accounting book. Very few people are excited by ledgers really, and the thing you can do with these new fancy ledgers have a lot to do with mostly mutually trusting businesses keeping track of balances between a small group. This is not exciting, will not change the world, but might make some details of finance folks and the people who write software for them a little easier.

[kaputmi]

"Crypto" is not a single entity! What hasn't figured this out yet is crypto markets, collectively — which were rewarding projects based on hype, not value provided to users. But there are some cases where people are building with real users in mind. Arweave and Uniswap come to mind.

[22289d]

I didn't feel like writing a novel that accounted for every edge case and I knew if my comment got any traction, folks like you would show up passionately pointing out the details I omitted or glossed over. Here we are.

You are correct, there are exceptions. You are correct, crypto is not a single entity. defi in particular is an area where there are a lot of products catering to real user needs as they're marketing to people who already own crypto. And for them, whether they need a db or not is irrelevant. Those users demand decentralized products, so if they want to serve them, they really don't have a choice. Uniswap would be committing suicide by deciding to use a db at this point.