Huh, useful analogy. I do think cryptocurrency has potential, I just think the expected altruism-value of the whole thing is quite negative currently, and has been for 5+ years, and this was super not true in the early days of the internet, even during the crash years.
(I was a very well-connected teenager in 1999 and I remember some things about the early internet… I remember the browser wars, Netscape, AltaVista, then Google, eBay and PayPal, as well as the adware, email viruses, chain letters, worms, hoaxes, etc.)
Early internet was clearly awful in so many ways but I think the benefits outweighed the drawbacks, at least as a kid—I have so many instances of getting value from the internet—mostly through education (by searching to solve problems, discovering forums, sharing info, etc).
Similarly, I was a fairly early adopter for crypto. Again, lots of technical promise. Seemed quite a cool community early on; I sipped 0.05 btc from the Bitcoin Faucet in early 2011, then gave in and bought $100 worth (at $8). Then I waited for useful stuff to come of it. And waited. I remember making arguments like “this is the first time computers can talk to each other and exchange value” to my friends and family. A few other coins seemed interesting—Namecoin seemed useful but didn’t pan out; I spent some time studying Stellar when it came out too, for similar “computers can send value” type reasons. I had started to get bored in 2015 and missed the launch of Ethereum, which was quite a promising thing in retrospect, but I didn’t miss the DAO collapse. I think it was around this time (2016-ish) that I started thinking that maybe the whole ecosystem was net negative.
Huh, useful analogy. I do think cryptocurrency has potential, I just think the expected altruism-value of the whole thing is quite negative currently, and has been for 5+ years, and this was super not true in the early days of the internet, even during the crash years.
(I was a very well-connected teenager in 1999 and I remember some things about the early internet… I remember the browser wars, Netscape, AltaVista, then Google, eBay and PayPal, as well as the adware, email viruses, chain letters, worms, hoaxes, etc.)
Early internet was clearly awful in so many ways but I think the benefits outweighed the drawbacks, at least as a kid—I have so many instances of getting value from the internet—mostly through education (by searching to solve problems, discovering forums, sharing info, etc).
Similarly, I was a fairly early adopter for crypto. Again, lots of technical promise. Seemed quite a cool community early on; I sipped 0.05 btc from the Bitcoin Faucet in early 2011, then gave in and bought $100 worth (at $8). Then I waited for useful stuff to come of it. And waited. I remember making arguments like “this is the first time computers can talk to each other and exchange value” to my friends and family. A few other coins seemed interesting—Namecoin seemed useful but didn’t pan out; I spent some time studying Stellar when it came out too, for similar “computers can send value” type reasons. I had started to get bored in 2015 and missed the launch of Ethereum, which was quite a promising thing in retrospect, but I didn’t miss the DAO collapse. I think it was around this time (2016-ish) that I started thinking that maybe the whole ecosystem was net negative.