Watch this video [1] of Bill Gates explaining the value of the Internet to David Letterman, where he's just not getting it at all. Bill's telling him the things it can do relative to David's interests, but he just sees those as problems that don't really exist because they've already been solved.
It took decades before the Internet was useful to "the masses." I don't think there's some conspiracy among VCs, but I do think dismissing cryptocurrencies for the reasons you have is short-sighted.
I tire of the internet comparison. You're drawing a surface-level comparison between the greatest communication and economic innovation in human history and blockchain software, because people were skeptical of both. And? That doesn't prove anything except that people were skeptical of both; nothing in that comparison speaks to the underlying nature of either things being compared. They are not the same.
> Where is the revolution? A common thread among cryptocurrency enthusiasts is that the revolution is coming... except it never does.
A technology doesn't need to have all of its potential realized in the first few years of its existence.
> Where is the disruption? Bitcoin is a smidgeon of a fraction of the commerce activity happening on the internet
The Internet was a fraction of the commerce activity happening relative to Sears / JC Penney / Walmart. Yet clearly only a few decades later all of these are disrupted by the Internet.
> bitcoin remains difficult and relatively unsafe to use (for the non-technical masses) and provides zero benefits for most people.
...as was the Internet for the first few decades.
> Contrast these facts on the ground with the never-ending blockchain hype and the result is overall disillusionment with blockchains in general.
This compares directly to, "Have you ever heard of radio?"
Literally every dismissal of cryptocurrencies you made would have applied exactly to the Internet in the early '90s or prior. There are far more similarities than "people were skeptical of both." It's totally fine to take your position but it's unrealistic to claim these as reasons it can't succeed.
> Literally every dismissal of cryptocurrencies you made would have applied exactly to the Internet in the early '90s or prior.
It seems I'm not getting through to you.
Just because two things have something in common doesn't mean that they're the same thing.
Showing that people were skeptical of the internet and blockchains does not demonstrate that blockchains will be as successful as the internet. There is no connection between the two (besides the fact that blockchains are software that run on the internet, like all things on the internet). They are totally different.
I guess I just feel like your rebuttal would be stronger if its only points weren't the same, yet ultimately irrelevant in the case of a prior technology with many similarities.
Of course they're not the same thing. That doesn't mean it's now totally valid to claim that it won't be successful due to the same roadblocks that the Internet overcame easily.
Do you have any arguments against cryptocurrencies that don't mirror early problems the Internet had, that people warned about, but ended up being very solvable? I think that'd be a lot more convincing.
Other than being a cryptocurrency, everything people are using blockchain based solutions for can be solved in a much more robust, complete, and scalable way using conventional software tools.
This is why it's not the revolutionary thing everyone is saying it is. As a cryptocurrency blockchain is the killer implementation. For anything else it just becomes a ridiculously bloated, clumsy, and slow database that hardly anyone understands and wastes electricity.
The "Internet" is not really a good comparison. The Internet existed for decades before it took off in the late 90s. And blockchain is part of the Internet--just another protocol.
What you're really talking about is the Web. That's the inflection point. Even email, a non-Web-based technology, saw a huge surge in adoption after free webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo came on the scene.
The big difference between the early Web and early blockchain is the barrier to entry. It was easy to set up websites--still is. That's how you got so many super young people finding huge success out of nowhere.
In comparison, blockchain has an incredibly hard barrier to entry. Not to use it--to build it. If you want to build a robust reliable blockchain, you need very solid cryptography skills. Very few people have that.
The structure of the growth has inverted. In the late 90s you had a lot of people you never heard of, and who were routinely dismissed by industry leaders. But they were building real products that took real business away from old established companies. The Web grew ground-up.
Today, the biggest pushers of blockchain are big established companies. Goldman Sachs. IBM. JP Morgan. The New York Stock Exchange. Big banks, big lawyers, big investors, etc.
I've been meeting with government entities in a country who IBM is heavily influencing with marketing. There are very low hanging fruit kind of technical problems that can be easily solved by mediocre CRUD app developers but due to the money in this region, companies like Oracle and more recently IBM has swooped in and sold them a bunch of things they don't need and have no idea how to integrate to solve the problems they're facing. Don't know how to build REST APIs? Buy our middleware!
Sitting down with people in charge of making these decisions and it's apparent they haven't the slightest clue what they're getting into. Their teams don't have the technical ability to build REST APIs to integrate with each others services, and now they've bought into IBM's message queue without a single developer on their side with the competence or experience to know what it is.
They've sold them solutions without taking into consideration the problem.
Now blockchain is the newest buzzword, spoken about like some magic IT pixie dust that was just invented to solve any technical problem -- "NOW you can go paperless, can make transactions, can store health records, provide government services" as if before it wasn't possible. Somehow people with no technical background are profiting immensely by holding conferences and speaking about things they don't understand. People are literally conversing with each other without having any idea what they're saying.
We got an email recently from an entity that is very interested in our platform stating "we want your product, and all new software must be blockchain enabled," whatever that means.
I recently went to a tech event first person I met was pitching his blockchain company about to launch next month. When questioned, within a few minutes he relented that they were not using blockchain at all.
I see blockchain as an evolutionary step for computing and the internet.
The internet is great because it grants the ability to communicate worldwide at minimal cost, to distribute software at minimal cost, and to replicate information at zero cost.
While copying is great for knowledge, it's problematic for value. Blockchain solves this, now you can share applications and communicate globally with objects of value. That's it.
I don't know if any of the current implementations will survive. I could see blockchain only running a small subset of online activity relating to finance, insurance, and law. I could also see it rendering our current conception of the internet sector as the media/advertising niche, the way cable changed broadcast TV forever.
Mostly I think the tech is really cool. So I'm going to keep messing with it. But I appreciate the skepticism, it means there's work to do.
The Internet opened up a whole new world of applications. Distributed ledgers do not. They are a complex and horribly inefficient solution to a very niche problem that crypto currrencies like Bitcoin have. But outside of that realm, they offer next to no technical advantages that would justify the exploding costs incurred by implementing this technology.
It took decades before the Internet was useful to "the masses." I don't think there's some conspiracy among VCs, but I do think dismissing cryptocurrencies for the reasons you have is short-sighted.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lskpNmUl8yQ