The Internet was opened to commercial use, in 1993. That is 29 years ago.
Bitcoin is half the age of the commercial Internet, so Bitcoin is no longer new.
14 years after the opening of the Internet to commercial use, Google was well established, Facebook and Twitter were rising rapidly, MySpace and Digg had already peaked but still had huge audiences. Amazon had already become a behemoth.
How many more years can people continue to claim "crypto is so new, it hasn't had time yet to establish a killer app"?
All of these industries had become major industries within 14 years of their discovery:
telephones, 1876, big industry by 1890
automobiles, 1886, big industry by 1900
The industry with the longest struggle to get the technology "good enough" was perhaps radio with modulation to carry the human voice, 1906 first proof of concept, the industry took off in 1920.
The point is, 14 years after their discovery, everyone could easily tell you what cars, telephones and commercial radio was for. The utility was obvious to everyone. But cryptocurrencies are still struggling to come up with a straightforward use case that people can understand.
They really aren’t. The store of value is the use case. Now you may not have confidence that the social contract for that value will persist. I personally don’t have a high degree of confidence. But to continue to ignore that this itself isn’t the value add is obtuse to the realities of political turmoil.
>14 years after the opening of the Internet to commercial use, Google was well established, Facebook and Twitter were rising rapidly, MySpace and Digg had already peaked but still had huge audiences. Amazon had already become a behemoth.
Difference is the things you listed are free services that had massive marketing budgets.
Bitcoin has zero marketing budget, grew from 0 organically, and adoption requires converting a percentage of your networth, which is a major ask. For this and many other technical/educational reasons the barrier to entry is much higher which makes this a bad comparison.
In 1983, with-in 14 years, it was widely successful for the academic and research institutions it was originally built for. It then started getting 'mainstream' attention.
ARPANET was opened up to commercial use in 1993, which is with-in ten years from TCP/IP go-live: again with-in 14 years.
Blockchains require systemic buy-in to reveal their instrinsic value. That means government implementation and enforcement, or at least some widespread system that recognizes a particular blockchain as law. It's coming, but slowly.
You talk about it as if there's a well-worn path that every viable technology must follow to succeed. Cue discussions about the first automobiles, the internet, the smart phone, etc. But history rhymes, it doesn't repeat. The internet's rise itself is a unique phenomenon. I'm more concerned with dealing with blockchains as a reality, not deciding whether or not they're actually happening. In my experience, almost every "nothing is happening, y'all are crazy" argument in the past 10 years has revealed itself to be toxic coping. Who does this denial actually help? So far, Western society is collapsing, finance is getting more centralized, global warming is coming along just fine, corporations are making decisions for us, and the internet is getting more and more totalitarian. All good?
Don't be surprised when the infrastructure magically appears and every asset you own is indexed and tracked on a blockchain. Oops! This is really not the time to be talking shit about cryptocurrencies as a concept, because they're going to be part of your life whether you like it or not. What you should be focusing on is helping shape them in your favor - because they're currently not.
So, let's assume it is, in fact, happening. The technology should also enable certain services which weren't possible before, but I'm not sure what those are. We see the corpos going into the "metaverse", and central banks going for CBDCs, which I suppose could work (for them), but if there was a pro-consumer service that can be deployed now it'd end discussions like this.
The Internet was opened to commercial use, in 1993. That is 29 years ago.
Bitcoin is half the age of the commercial Internet, so Bitcoin is no longer new.
14 years after the opening of the Internet to commercial use, Google was well established, Facebook and Twitter were rising rapidly, MySpace and Digg had already peaked but still had huge audiences. Amazon had already become a behemoth.
How many more years can people continue to claim "crypto is so new, it hasn't had time yet to establish a killer app"?
All of these industries had become major industries within 14 years of their discovery:
telephones, 1876, big industry by 1890
automobiles, 1886, big industry by 1900
The industry with the longest struggle to get the technology "good enough" was perhaps radio with modulation to carry the human voice, 1906 first proof of concept, the industry took off in 1920.
The point is, 14 years after their discovery, everyone could easily tell you what cars, telephones and commercial radio was for. The utility was obvious to everyone. But cryptocurrencies are still struggling to come up with a straightforward use case that people can understand.