[acdha]

Those comparisons are incredibly mismatched. In 1980 a computer cost as much as a car, and network connections were incredibly expensive and slow. Bill Gates, child of wealth and privilege, famously had to use a shared computer paid for by his elite school because even the child of an IBM board member wouldn’t have access to a computer! The microprocessor revolution unfolded in the 80s, however, so even your timeline is off by over a decade because people paid money to get online because things like email, telnet, Usenet, and FTP were immediately useful. By 1995, the web was already multiple years into extreme growth – very little of which was directly related to selling as opposed to all of the things you could do with it. Nobody was saying you should buy a modem and sit on it before reselling it at a profit, they were talking about all of the things you could do once you had one!

Similarly, nobody doubted that neural networks were capable of very interesting things - the holdup was the level of processing power needed to run them. As soon as that changes, useful applications abounded.

Those make quite the contrast with bitcoin which has been universally available to a much, much larger population and had truly massive resources available, but almost no meaningful impact because it doesn’t give most people anything new or better. The few businesses which aren’t trying to market it and still accept it almost universally convert BTC into real currency as soon as they receive it, companies like Western Union and Visa haven’t felt the need to lower rates, and to the extent that PayPal is reconsidering screwing everyone so aggressively it’s because of Venmo and Stripe, not Bitcoin.

[mattdesl]

> Similarly, nobody doubted that neural networks were capable of very interesting things - the holdup was the level of processing power needed to run them. As soon as that changes, useful applications abounded.

This is incorrect. AI has gone through multiple ‘winters’ where there were serious doubts and pessimistic attitudes toward its capabilities.

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

[acdha]

Yes, I’m aware of AI winters but that doesn’t affect the point I was making: people knew neural networks were capable of the task since neuroscientists were studying how our own brains used them, but they were computationally daunting. “AI winter” didn’t mean that everyone gave up and assumed the theists were right that some supernatural power was the key part, it meant that developing commercially-viable technologies was harder than hoped.

That’s where the contrast with Bitcoin is so pronounced: in that case, the limitation isn’t technical but political - it’s been available to anyone who wants it for 15 years but most people don’t want it because you have to strongly share a certain ideology to prefer a slower, less secure, more expensive financial system. There is no technical improvement which will suddenly boost Bitcoin adoption the way GPUs and smart algorithms boosted neural networks because the inefficiency is the point.

[mattdesl]

the whole idea of an “AI winter” is that people did not feel that AI was capable and worth pursuing, the Wikipedia link makes that sentiment clear. The remaining computer scientists still working in AI space obviously continued developing the technology despite the lack of public interest and major funding, but the same happens in crypto: engineers are still developing new ideas and technologies within blockchain space (ZK proofs, verkle trees, etc). Bitcoin has stagnated but other technologies have not.

[acdha]

> the whole idea of an “AI winter” is that people did not feel that AI was capable and worth pursuing, the Wikipedia link makes that sentiment clear.

Try counting the number of times people mention phrases like “combinatorial explosion” or other limitations like the single/multi-layer perceptron argument, which are the kinds of problems we’re talking about where the issue was feasibility on the hardware available, or things like “expert systems” which were dead ends unrelated to neural networks.

Now, you can try to change the topic again to hypothesize that some non-blockchain technology will become popular but that’s no more relevant to this thread than the 80s expert systems people were to modern machine learning systems. Different technology and implementations having different results isn’t exactly disproving criticism.

[mattdesl]

If “nobody doubted” AI, there would not have been an AI winter in the first place.

> Now, you can try to change the topic again to hypothesize that some non-blockchain technology will become popular but that’s no more relevant to this thread than the 80s expert systems people were to modern machine learning systems.

Practical ZKP and accessible circuit programming is definitely relevant to blockchains; it is one example of technological advancement in crypto that has led to significant advancements. If the only technology you look at is Bitcoin, which is stagnant and hasn’t progressed in many years, of course it will look like nothing in blockchain technology has progressed.

[acdha]

> If “nobody doubted” AI, there would not have been an AI winter in the first place.

Hint: neural network and AI are not synonyms. You were corrected after conflating the two.

> If the only technology you look at is Bitcoin, which is stagnant and hasn’t progressed in many years, of course it will look like nothing in blockchain technology has progressed.

This post is about Bitcoin so it’s unsurprisingly discussing that, especially since that’s where most of the usage is. Neither of the things you mentioned solve the underlying architectural problems inherent to blockchains, although the ZK stuff does help with privacy somewhat, but again I would remind you that the comparison to the early internet still runs afoul of lack of demand for blockchains. People didn’t need a FOMO sales pitch to see that going online was useful; for a payment system to become popular it needs to offer an advantage on price, performance, or security – the ceiling for how much most people will pay for a cryptocurrency is whatever it costs to use Venmo or Square so the focus needs to be on outcompeting the status quo and setting realistic expectations for how much shaving a point or two off of a transaction price will really change the world.