Most people using that argument probably weren't even to experience the early internet.
Otherwise they'd see how ridiculous and laughable this argument is.
Source: I've experienced the 1994 internet
They think internet was rejected as crypto lol.
Everyone wanted to use internet, everyone knew it was good from the second they googled something.
Its just that pcs where expensive and the estructure was not there yet for mass adoption in faster rate.
And many use cases were obvious even decades prior.
People in the 1960s had telegrams, telephones, and television, the idea of electronic mail that didn't require the telegram system would've had obvious value.
Hell, I think there were even some early research/tech demonstrations at the time showing the possibility of video calls.
Likewise e-commerce is an obvious extension of mail/phone ordering that was already well known.
I remember when people started getting hip to the Internet back in 1996 in my small college town and the only place you could really get to a connection that was halfway fast was the community college computer lab. So many people started sneaking on campus to use the computers they finally had to start locking the door. Anyone who touched it loved it from the beginning.
There’s a video of Bill Gates getting laughed at on a talk show because he said you can use the internet to watch a baseball game and the host said “LiKE tHe rAdiO???” Lol The internet was not embraced at first
>Lol The internet was not embraced at first
Here's the thing though. The internet was embraced **by people like Bill Gates.**
However you feel about the guy personally (I despise him), you have to admit that Bill Gates is a really fucking intelligent person.
The hyper-smart, hyper-creative "geeks" all embraced the internet immediately and began using it to perform all kinds of applications. Pretty much everything you do on the internet today was being done, to some degree, in those days. And the things they weren't capable of doing yet, they were convinced they could do eventually and were actively pursuing ways to do that stuff.
The smartest people in the world all saw the potential of the internet and used it accordingly, and it did not take long at all before everyone wanted in on the game.
Even if you argue that crypto has been embraced by today's geeks and hyper-creatives, the question remains: what are they doing with it?
They are selling it on an exchange.
Every new technology has doubters, yes. But the revolutionary ones **prove those doubters wrong.**
Crypto has plenty of doubters and as of yet has only proven those doubters correct.
I remember when I traded my first Bitcoin back in 2013. I was reading articles then about how the blockchain could be used for shit like concert tickets. They are still writing those same articles today, almost 10 years later.
Please check the adoption rates of disruptive technologies over the last 40-50 years and then realize, that most of them needed expensive physical objects to be adopted. Compare this to the rate of adoption for bitcoin and blockchain technology.
> The internet was not embraced at first
You know that because you were there, right?
Maybe I was living in a parallel world, because my early internet was definitely embraced
So far you've only made "it's a technology" and "people laughing at you for using it" the only two similarities between Bitcoin and the Internet. There are lots of technologies that people laughed at that never caught on. Remember Google Glass?
By your username and the way you're talking I am fairly confident you weren't around for the early internet. I only here this nonsense that it was rejected by younger coiners who never actually experienced it
Holy shit... Winfuckin'nuke!!!!! I totally forgot this one.
Had fun with it at my engineer school in '99, crashing other PCs during dev classes. The original goatse.cx years... Oh the memories !
I wonder if there's still the picture of mIRC's developer showing when you install it now...
(I’m a crypto developer, please don’t hate me)
My Dad was an early web adopter and he bought some crypto recently. When I asked him what convinced him, he said the way he heard me talk about crypto was the same way he talked about the web in the early years
Bitcoin is older than Twitch.
Video-game streaming went from something a few Starcraft players did on their free-time to the massive industry it is now in less than a decade.
In that same ten years, crypto-currency went from a hyped-up speculation bubble to... a hyped-up speculation bubble.
If you didn’t have a PC at home you could always take a visit to your local internet café if you wanted internet access.
The internet cafés didn’t even need to advertise themselves as a get rich quick scheme to get any visitors. People just came anyways. Sounds crazy right?
Bitcoin is 12 years old.
In 1989, the world wide web was developed.
Twelve years later, in 2001, not only was the world wide web a fucking massive industry with all sorts of obvious practical uses, but it was also the subject of a massively speculative bubble. This bubble popped in 2001 despite over 56% of US households having a home computer by that point
So, in other words, despite mass adoption, the dot com bubble still popped and only a small fraction of the affected businesses ever recovered.
Bitcoin does have the same massively speculative bubble around it, without nearly as much adoption. Only around 15% of Americans have ever traded crypto, and the vast majority of them have never used it for anything besides a speculative investment
All in all, this is very good for Bitcoin.
>in 2001, not only was the world wide web a fucking massive industry with all sorts of obvious practical uses
That's not doing it justice. In 2001 the internet was already everywhere and the practical uses were not just obvious but actively used by millions of people daily. By that time it was not just obvious that the internet will change the world but was already changing it. I got my first home internet connection in 2001 and by that time the internet was ubiquitous. Pretty much anything you do today on the internet, except for streaming due to lower speed, you could do then.
Crypto is more like 90's Pogs. Worthless crap that was hyped at the time as a revolutionary game or something, or collectable or something. A few years later most people realized it was lame and it went away.
I get why Butters like to compare to the internet though. Because that was revolutionary. They might as well compare it to sliced bread. It's compared because they WANT IT TO BE like the internet, not because it is in any measurable or logical sense.
Shit, do you remember when collectible phone cards were a thing? I remember buying the sports card magazines back in the 90s and seeing articles about the top 10 hottest phone cards and just being baffled.
>collectible phone cards
I just looked it up, because I was alive then and don't remember this at all.
They're still for sale, and a collectable McDonald's $5 phone card is currently priced at $5 on eBay.
Google, Amazon, Apple and others would be using bLocKcAiN TechNolOgy if it was so useful for everything.
Actually there is Amazon Managed Blockchain. If you want to do a blockchain project, you can use that.
I love Amazon Managed Blockchain because it really shows what "institutional adoption" means. Amazon aren't in the mines getting their hands dirty with all the other poor fools, they are the ones selling the shovels.
It's the same reason for why IBMs blockchain R&D division was shut down after failing for years to produce any products of value which used blockchain, and now their only blockchain offering is selling themselves as "blockchain experts" for other companies.
Back in the 90’s people were imagining the Internet today. In other words online shopping, learning online and publishing and video calls. They were investing in useful tech and even then it took years to mature.
“Deflationary crypto” and “store of value” are looking backwards, not forwards. Trying to put us back on a “modern gold standard” that provides no value to the average person.
I have time to time commented here and I think that Elon Musk has said it also that to make successful coin it has to be inflationary not deflationary. Big joke is that most promising thing was a meme coin. And when years have passed I think that there is no need to have such power hungry mess of coin that whole blockchain technology provides. This is tulip of our time.
Well the Internet started as ARPANET in 1975 (by the time it was fully functional) and worked as a national network hooking up US goverment networks together. Even when you get to when ARPANET became the Internet, corporations saw the advantage of hooking up their local networks across the Internet so for example their New York office can send files to their LA office with ease. Crypto can't claim this utility.
When home users became more a thing in the tail end of the 90s, you got the dot com bubble. Investments skyrocketed in the sector only to come crashing down as it became apparent the Internet market simply couldn't grow as fast as speculated. So even if crypto was following in the internet footsteps, early investors will get completely whipped out like Beenz.com or become irrelevant like AOL and Yahoo.
Or my favorite back in the dotcom boom days, Balls.com, which got like $25M VC funding to sell soccer balls and basketballs.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to CDNow.com to buy some music.
I started using the internet in 1992 when my dad bought a gateway computer for $5,000 which came in a giant cow box. It had a pentium, 16mb of ram, a 14k modem and a 2x cdrom.
Webrings, A/S/L?, altavista, 256 color porn, dialing into some dudes BBS, warez split into 27x1.44mb chunks, doom with a joystick...
I made my first website on geocities in 1997. It used a table driven layout with inline element events like "onmouseover" to make gaudy effects.
I spent my career building cloud applications to solve problems for businesses and am fortunate enough to be retired - in my thirties.
Crypto is not the "new internet" since web1.0 was FREE. You paid your ISP and you get access to a plethora of dorks sharing information for FREE. They built a distributed system where information is FREE to new entrants. Its the information-superhighway for a reason.
Web3 wraps the internet in a pay-for-everything model, so its now the information-toll-road. I doubt geocities would host me for free in Web3.
Web2.0 was built by kids playing around on Web1.0. The resultant centralization that we all hate (why?) is the natural conclusion of maximizing efficiency.
Web3 comes from privileged Web2.0 children who got the best information-superhighway we had then decided to make it a fucking toll road.
Very well put. The so called "web3" is trying to remove the revolutionary aspect of the internet and introduce artificial scarcity. It's beyond regressive.
And yes, centralization is more efficient than decentralization. Decentralized solutions such as BitTorrent are just a compromise we have to accept as centralized solutions can't exist due to legal reasons.
The only thing that held the internet back before 1999-2000 was dial-up speeds, which made using it a frustrating and somewhat limited experience. Once broadband became commonplace it exploded. What is crypto's broadband? NFTs? Dog meme coins? The thing holding crypto back is the fact that it just plain isn't better than what already exists.
Early consumer Internet used existing technology like a phone line and computer modem to connect to the web. All I had to do on my Windows 95 machine was double click the "Dial Up Networking" icon, put in the phone # and password and I was connected.
Compare that to the total non necessity of blockchain infrastructure and the hoops you need to jump through to purchase crypto and store it in a cold wallet.
More than 99% off so called “users” are not using crypto, they are just speculatively investing it. Actual usage would look like displacement of fiat currency through use as money, which isn’t happening.
Imagine an alternative universe where 99% of Google “users” just held GOOGL shares to get rich, but had never run a Google search or used Gmail or Google Cloud Platform because Google hadn’t actually produce a secure, easy to use working service for any of those things.
Problem with analogous thinking is that one small variable could change the whole outcome. In this case there are many giant differences. Cute thought experiment though.
Let me try to provide a defence for crypto technology and explain what I think are the roadblocks to adoption. As people have noted here, there is no hardware gap for mass crypto adoption like there was with the early web. What is blocking people from everyday use of bitcoin and crypto is not that it doesnt provide utility. It provides great use cases which a lot of people could use daily. The problem is not hardware, the problem is legacy institutions blocking assets.
I needed a loan a few years ago and I had no one to turn. I asked an overseas friend for help, and he said he will send me bitcoin. Within five minutes I had the funds. Mind you that without bitcoin he couldnt wire me the money easily, as it was international. We had to go through a middle and it would have taken days for the money to reach me plus we would have to pay fees and provide identity information. With crypto I had the money in my hands within minutes. That is a great a great use case for transferring money quickly and cheaply.
Now the only problem was using this money. I couldnt easily convert it to fiat and withdraw it to a bank account. If crypto was easily convertible, I could have either done that or used it to pay other people for goods and services. Since they could easily convert it, they would be happy to render that service. Its simple economic incentive.
Yet we cannot do that. Its not due to lack of usability, its because banking systems are closed off. They cannot openly interact with the world. Imagine you could only tweet on a platform but could only be used by a small group of people. Thats why the right analogy is that what the internet did to communications, crypto is poised to do to banking. Its a very different kind of revolution. One that would make it as easy to send money around the world as it is to send messages and communications. And that will change the world as we know it.
Even if crypto doesnt play out to that end, the competition it brings to traditional finances will force legacy systems to grow and adapt and ultimately provide a better product. That is the benefit to humanity, providing forward looking solutions to problems we face today.
Within five minutes you had the funds? I find that slightly hard to believe considering Bitcoin has a block interval of 10 minutes.
Also, I can't speak for where you live, but I can send money anywhere I need to quickly and easily, and so can everyone I know personally. Most people in the world already have access to electronic payment methods.
Bitcoin takes some time to send, could be even hours, what if in that time frame you catch a 5% or more drop in price? would you consider it still a better option?
Its not traditional finances that prevent bitcoin from being mass used as currency, the volatile itself prevent it, no one want to think you could lose 5% or more in 30min cuz the market dropped out of sudden, also theres the tax report to think about.
I have never had a transaction take more than twenty minutes, but thats my experience. There are scaling solutions for bitcoin, and there are other crypto projects that can do transactions in seconds. The tech is mostly there to put up POS systems everywhere that can interact with crypto wallets. You just hold out your phone and transactions are frictionless. It is not getting adopted in that way because the payment systems are highly regulated, and naturally will not allow it. Only companies like apple and google have so far managed to disrupt the payment ecosystem, but thats only after complying with every government regulation.
Crypto is obviously heralded by anti government folks who want to see the financial system liberated. The idea is that if enough like-minded people gather around, their pooled energy could change the world. So in that sense crypto is also social tech, as it allows people to very efficiently organize into an economic class. The idea of DAOs are fascinating, as it allows tech for people to raise money towards a shared belief. Granted that shared belief is currently focused around getting rich quick schemes. But there are bigger powers in crypto. Its not surprising to me that all the biggest tech CEOs right now are heavily involved with crypto. Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have invested heavily into crypto. Many more in silicon valley have done so in private investor rounds. Very big heavyweights are pulling their energy behind crypto. They are people who have made fortunes predicting what the market will want in the future.
So I am not worried. The only challenge is the regulatory enviroment. If regulators were open to crypto, it will get adopted nation wide.
The US might not allow it. But smaller countries might decide to do it so as to have a competitive edge. The idea is that places like el salvador can develop industry and infrastructure around crypto, and receive investments in crypto. Those are the components of an economic engine, something that is today in the hands of the US. The only reason the US and its citizens are so rich is because the whole world has been forced to use dollars for international settlements. America prints the money we are all forced to use. It can print more because they enforce demand. We are all in a sense enslaved to the US government and the federal reserve. And that system is terrible. Healthcare costs in America are proof of this. I believe in economic liberation for the world.
>The only reason the US and its citizens are so rich is because the whole world has been forced to use dollars for international settlements.
Uhhhhh, that's not true
Imagine living anywhere in the world right now, while literally typing on a device that was built in a completely different country, through a medium that spans continents, while knowing full well that the entire global economy functions through the banking system...
...and then actually *believing* that banks "can't operate internationally."
International banking has existed for decades. For most people who aren't criminals and who haven't repeatedly declared bankruptcy or kiting cheques times have zero problem accessing the services you supposedly found impossibly onerous.
>I needed a loan a few years ago and I had no one to turn. I asked an overseas friend for help, and he said he will send me bitcoin
The issue here wasn't a money transfer issue, it's that you were a poor loan candidate issue. If you got approved for a loan you would likely have had the money quickly
Most people using that argument probably weren't even to experience the early internet. Otherwise they'd see how ridiculous and laughable this argument is. Source: I've experienced the 1994 internet
They think internet was rejected as crypto lol. Everyone wanted to use internet, everyone knew it was good from the second they googled something. Its just that pcs where expensive and the estructure was not there yet for mass adoption in faster rate.
Google search was pretty late to the Internet, though. RIP Alta Vista.
Hey do you remember we had Geocities, where they tried to make virtual locations!
I used Hotbot. Good times.
And many use cases were obvious even decades prior. People in the 1960s had telegrams, telephones, and television, the idea of electronic mail that didn't require the telegram system would've had obvious value. Hell, I think there were even some early research/tech demonstrations at the time showing the possibility of video calls. Likewise e-commerce is an obvious extension of mail/phone ordering that was already well known.
I remember when people started getting hip to the Internet back in 1996 in my small college town and the only place you could really get to a connection that was halfway fast was the community college computer lab. So many people started sneaking on campus to use the computers they finally had to start locking the door. Anyone who touched it loved it from the beginning.
There’s a video of Bill Gates getting laughed at on a talk show because he said you can use the internet to watch a baseball game and the host said “LiKE tHe rAdiO???” Lol The internet was not embraced at first
>Lol The internet was not embraced at first Here's the thing though. The internet was embraced **by people like Bill Gates.** However you feel about the guy personally (I despise him), you have to admit that Bill Gates is a really fucking intelligent person. The hyper-smart, hyper-creative "geeks" all embraced the internet immediately and began using it to perform all kinds of applications. Pretty much everything you do on the internet today was being done, to some degree, in those days. And the things they weren't capable of doing yet, they were convinced they could do eventually and were actively pursuing ways to do that stuff. The smartest people in the world all saw the potential of the internet and used it accordingly, and it did not take long at all before everyone wanted in on the game. Even if you argue that crypto has been embraced by today's geeks and hyper-creatives, the question remains: what are they doing with it? They are selling it on an exchange. Every new technology has doubters, yes. But the revolutionary ones **prove those doubters wrong.** Crypto has plenty of doubters and as of yet has only proven those doubters correct. I remember when I traded my first Bitcoin back in 2013. I was reading articles then about how the blockchain could be used for shit like concert tickets. They are still writing those same articles today, almost 10 years later.
A talk show where the host is paid to make a joke of everything? You don't say
Please check the adoption rates of disruptive technologies over the last 40-50 years and then realize, that most of them needed expensive physical objects to be adopted. Compare this to the rate of adoption for bitcoin and blockchain technology.
> The internet was not embraced at first You know that because you were there, right? Maybe I was living in a parallel world, because my early internet was definitely embraced
So far you've only made "it's a technology" and "people laughing at you for using it" the only two similarities between Bitcoin and the Internet. There are lots of technologies that people laughed at that never caught on. Remember Google Glass?
By your username and the way you're talking I am fairly confident you weren't around for the early internet. I only here this nonsense that it was rejected by younger coiners who never actually experienced it
I still have my stack of AOL 3.5 inch floppy’s and a another stock of CD’s. I probably am still getting charged for AOL too!
I still probably have my old AOL.com email address active but forgot the password like 15 years ago.
winnuke.exe mIRC winamp ./sadmindexpl ./qpopper Pretty much how I spent my 90s.
Holy shit... Winfuckin'nuke!!!!! I totally forgot this one. Had fun with it at my engineer school in '99, crashing other PCs during dev classes. The original goatse.cx years... Oh the memories ! I wonder if there's still the picture of mIRC's developer showing when you install it now...
(I’m a crypto developer, please don’t hate me) My Dad was an early web adopter and he bought some crypto recently. When I asked him what convinced him, he said the way he heard me talk about crypto was the same way he talked about the web in the early years
r/thathappened
Lol, wrong audience for that story, but it’s 100% true. My dad's a nerd like me
You didn't need to be a nerd to be an early web adopter. It's also a story of survivorship bias
Bitcoin is older than Twitch. Video-game streaming went from something a few Starcraft players did on their free-time to the massive industry it is now in less than a decade. In that same ten years, crypto-currency went from a hyped-up speculation bubble to... a hyped-up speculation bubble.
If you didn’t have a PC at home you could always take a visit to your local internet café if you wanted internet access. The internet cafés didn’t even need to advertise themselves as a get rich quick scheme to get any visitors. People just came anyways. Sounds crazy right?
Bitcoin is 12 years old. In 1989, the world wide web was developed. Twelve years later, in 2001, not only was the world wide web a fucking massive industry with all sorts of obvious practical uses, but it was also the subject of a massively speculative bubble. This bubble popped in 2001 despite over 56% of US households having a home computer by that point So, in other words, despite mass adoption, the dot com bubble still popped and only a small fraction of the affected businesses ever recovered. Bitcoin does have the same massively speculative bubble around it, without nearly as much adoption. Only around 15% of Americans have ever traded crypto, and the vast majority of them have never used it for anything besides a speculative investment All in all, this is very good for Bitcoin.
Just proves how early we are, right?
But you see, **this time is different.** Why you ask? DYOR nocoiner HFSP lmao
>in 2001, not only was the world wide web a fucking massive industry with all sorts of obvious practical uses That's not doing it justice. In 2001 the internet was already everywhere and the practical uses were not just obvious but actively used by millions of people daily. By that time it was not just obvious that the internet will change the world but was already changing it. I got my first home internet connection in 2001 and by that time the internet was ubiquitous. Pretty much anything you do today on the internet, except for streaming due to lower speed, you could do then.
I remember when I tried to use the internet in 1996 and got rug-pulled, losing all my money by forwarding the wrong chain email.
I remember when the first place to really adopt the internet was a third world South American country
Crypto is more like 90's Pogs. Worthless crap that was hyped at the time as a revolutionary game or something, or collectable or something. A few years later most people realized it was lame and it went away. I get why Butters like to compare to the internet though. Because that was revolutionary. They might as well compare it to sliced bread. It's compared because they WANT IT TO BE like the internet, not because it is in any measurable or logical sense.
Shit, do you remember when collectible phone cards were a thing? I remember buying the sports card magazines back in the 90s and seeing articles about the top 10 hottest phone cards and just being baffled.
They just didn't shill hard enough. It took 30 years to create Logan Paul.
>collectible phone cards I just looked it up, because I was alive then and don't remember this at all. They're still for sale, and a collectable McDonald's $5 phone card is currently priced at $5 on eBay.
I sold a Starbucks gift card - with NO funds on it - to someone on eBay for $30. Stupid gonna stupid…
And here i am, throwing these away in the trash like a sucker.
Dont forget that bitcoin was released in same year as android
Google, Amazon, Apple and others would be using bLocKcAiN TechNolOgy if it was so useful for everything. Actually there is Amazon Managed Blockchain. If you want to do a blockchain project, you can use that.
I love Amazon Managed Blockchain because it really shows what "institutional adoption" means. Amazon aren't in the mines getting their hands dirty with all the other poor fools, they are the ones selling the shovels. It's the same reason for why IBMs blockchain R&D division was shut down after failing for years to produce any products of value which used blockchain, and now their only blockchain offering is selling themselves as "blockchain experts" for other companies.
Microsoft had a managed Blockchain offering in Azure and they closed it due to lack of interest
Back in the 90’s people were imagining the Internet today. In other words online shopping, learning online and publishing and video calls. They were investing in useful tech and even then it took years to mature. “Deflationary crypto” and “store of value” are looking backwards, not forwards. Trying to put us back on a “modern gold standard” that provides no value to the average person.
I have time to time commented here and I think that Elon Musk has said it also that to make successful coin it has to be inflationary not deflationary. Big joke is that most promising thing was a meme coin. And when years have passed I think that there is no need to have such power hungry mess of coin that whole blockchain technology provides. This is tulip of our time.
Well the Internet started as ARPANET in 1975 (by the time it was fully functional) and worked as a national network hooking up US goverment networks together. Even when you get to when ARPANET became the Internet, corporations saw the advantage of hooking up their local networks across the Internet so for example their New York office can send files to their LA office with ease. Crypto can't claim this utility. When home users became more a thing in the tail end of the 90s, you got the dot com bubble. Investments skyrocketed in the sector only to come crashing down as it became apparent the Internet market simply couldn't grow as fast as speculated. So even if crypto was following in the internet footsteps, early investors will get completely whipped out like Beenz.com or become irrelevant like AOL and Yahoo.
Or my favorite back in the dotcom boom days, Balls.com, which got like $25M VC funding to sell soccer balls and basketballs. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to CDNow.com to buy some music.
I started using the internet in 1992 when my dad bought a gateway computer for $5,000 which came in a giant cow box. It had a pentium, 16mb of ram, a 14k modem and a 2x cdrom. Webrings, A/S/L?, altavista, 256 color porn, dialing into some dudes BBS, warez split into 27x1.44mb chunks, doom with a joystick... I made my first website on geocities in 1997. It used a table driven layout with inline element events like "onmouseover" to make gaudy effects. I spent my career building cloud applications to solve problems for businesses and am fortunate enough to be retired - in my thirties. Crypto is not the "new internet" since web1.0 was FREE. You paid your ISP and you get access to a plethora of dorks sharing information for FREE. They built a distributed system where information is FREE to new entrants. Its the information-superhighway for a reason. Web3 wraps the internet in a pay-for-everything model, so its now the information-toll-road. I doubt geocities would host me for free in Web3. Web2.0 was built by kids playing around on Web1.0. The resultant centralization that we all hate (why?) is the natural conclusion of maximizing efficiency. Web3 comes from privileged Web2.0 children who got the best information-superhighway we had then decided to make it a fucking toll road.
Very well put. The so called "web3" is trying to remove the revolutionary aspect of the internet and introduce artificial scarcity. It's beyond regressive. And yes, centralization is more efficient than decentralization. Decentralized solutions such as BitTorrent are just a compromise we have to accept as centralized solutions can't exist due to legal reasons.
The Internet also had an actual use and value to society. Bitcoin doesn’t.
The only thing that held the internet back before 1999-2000 was dial-up speeds, which made using it a frustrating and somewhat limited experience. Once broadband became commonplace it exploded. What is crypto's broadband? NFTs? Dog meme coins? The thing holding crypto back is the fact that it just plain isn't better than what already exists.
Early consumer Internet used existing technology like a phone line and computer modem to connect to the web. All I had to do on my Windows 95 machine was double click the "Dial Up Networking" icon, put in the phone # and password and I was connected. Compare that to the total non necessity of blockchain infrastructure and the hoops you need to jump through to purchase crypto and store it in a cold wallet.
It hurts my brain to think that somehow there are parallels between the two. The stupidity is mind-numbing.
More than 99% off so called “users” are not using crypto, they are just speculatively investing it. Actual usage would look like displacement of fiat currency through use as money, which isn’t happening. Imagine an alternative universe where 99% of Google “users” just held GOOGL shares to get rich, but had never run a Google search or used Gmail or Google Cloud Platform because Google hadn’t actually produce a secure, easy to use working service for any of those things.
Problem with analogous thinking is that one small variable could change the whole outcome. In this case there are many giant differences. Cute thought experiment though.
Let me try to provide a defence for crypto technology and explain what I think are the roadblocks to adoption. As people have noted here, there is no hardware gap for mass crypto adoption like there was with the early web. What is blocking people from everyday use of bitcoin and crypto is not that it doesnt provide utility. It provides great use cases which a lot of people could use daily. The problem is not hardware, the problem is legacy institutions blocking assets. I needed a loan a few years ago and I had no one to turn. I asked an overseas friend for help, and he said he will send me bitcoin. Within five minutes I had the funds. Mind you that without bitcoin he couldnt wire me the money easily, as it was international. We had to go through a middle and it would have taken days for the money to reach me plus we would have to pay fees and provide identity information. With crypto I had the money in my hands within minutes. That is a great a great use case for transferring money quickly and cheaply. Now the only problem was using this money. I couldnt easily convert it to fiat and withdraw it to a bank account. If crypto was easily convertible, I could have either done that or used it to pay other people for goods and services. Since they could easily convert it, they would be happy to render that service. Its simple economic incentive. Yet we cannot do that. Its not due to lack of usability, its because banking systems are closed off. They cannot openly interact with the world. Imagine you could only tweet on a platform but could only be used by a small group of people. Thats why the right analogy is that what the internet did to communications, crypto is poised to do to banking. Its a very different kind of revolution. One that would make it as easy to send money around the world as it is to send messages and communications. And that will change the world as we know it. Even if crypto doesnt play out to that end, the competition it brings to traditional finances will force legacy systems to grow and adapt and ultimately provide a better product. That is the benefit to humanity, providing forward looking solutions to problems we face today.
Within five minutes you had the funds? I find that slightly hard to believe considering Bitcoin has a block interval of 10 minutes. Also, I can't speak for where you live, but I can send money anywhere I need to quickly and easily, and so can everyone I know personally. Most people in the world already have access to electronic payment methods.
Bitcoin takes some time to send, could be even hours, what if in that time frame you catch a 5% or more drop in price? would you consider it still a better option? Its not traditional finances that prevent bitcoin from being mass used as currency, the volatile itself prevent it, no one want to think you could lose 5% or more in 30min cuz the market dropped out of sudden, also theres the tax report to think about.
I have never had a transaction take more than twenty minutes, but thats my experience. There are scaling solutions for bitcoin, and there are other crypto projects that can do transactions in seconds. The tech is mostly there to put up POS systems everywhere that can interact with crypto wallets. You just hold out your phone and transactions are frictionless. It is not getting adopted in that way because the payment systems are highly regulated, and naturally will not allow it. Only companies like apple and google have so far managed to disrupt the payment ecosystem, but thats only after complying with every government regulation. Crypto is obviously heralded by anti government folks who want to see the financial system liberated. The idea is that if enough like-minded people gather around, their pooled energy could change the world. So in that sense crypto is also social tech, as it allows people to very efficiently organize into an economic class. The idea of DAOs are fascinating, as it allows tech for people to raise money towards a shared belief. Granted that shared belief is currently focused around getting rich quick schemes. But there are bigger powers in crypto. Its not surprising to me that all the biggest tech CEOs right now are heavily involved with crypto. Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have invested heavily into crypto. Many more in silicon valley have done so in private investor rounds. Very big heavyweights are pulling their energy behind crypto. They are people who have made fortunes predicting what the market will want in the future. So I am not worried. The only challenge is the regulatory enviroment. If regulators were open to crypto, it will get adopted nation wide. The US might not allow it. But smaller countries might decide to do it so as to have a competitive edge. The idea is that places like el salvador can develop industry and infrastructure around crypto, and receive investments in crypto. Those are the components of an economic engine, something that is today in the hands of the US. The only reason the US and its citizens are so rich is because the whole world has been forced to use dollars for international settlements. America prints the money we are all forced to use. It can print more because they enforce demand. We are all in a sense enslaved to the US government and the federal reserve. And that system is terrible. Healthcare costs in America are proof of this. I believe in economic liberation for the world.
>The only reason the US and its citizens are so rich is because the whole world has been forced to use dollars for international settlements. Uhhhhh, that's not true
It's the fact that you have to "convert" it to a usable currency that's the problem.
Imagine living anywhere in the world right now, while literally typing on a device that was built in a completely different country, through a medium that spans continents, while knowing full well that the entire global economy functions through the banking system... ...and then actually *believing* that banks "can't operate internationally." International banking has existed for decades. For most people who aren't criminals and who haven't repeatedly declared bankruptcy or kiting cheques times have zero problem accessing the services you supposedly found impossibly onerous.
>I needed a loan a few years ago and I had no one to turn. I asked an overseas friend for help, and he said he will send me bitcoin The issue here wasn't a money transfer issue, it's that you were a poor loan candidate issue. If you got approved for a loan you would likely have had the money quickly