At least one of the implications of systems like ethereum is that they enable autonomous contracts that are decentralised and at least in theory don't require any separate and typically centralised governing body to execute and enforce, which could in turn lead to a range of new models of business and human interaction.

It remains to be seen what will happen, the technology is still young (the Web took about a decade to start catching on in the mainstream as perhaps being something more than a flash in the pan) and lofty ideas are being thrown at the wall as the new concepts are explored in both good and bad ways.

Having seen the ups and downs of the online revolution I have a hunch at least some of it will stick, and whether this moment goes down as some great proletarian revolution or becomes just another tool in the billionaires belt seems up in the air to me, but at the very least it is disruptive and we may be seeing the birth of the next generation of crypto barons.

Or anything could happen, like by some unlikely turn of events we solve prime factorisation and the whole thing fizzles into history as a big oops moment, or jackbooted forces raid homes and data centres to destroy all crypto-related hardware and knowledge.

I feel the outcome will be somewhere between the two extremes of utopia and dystopia, it just seems to be how things turn out, but as you say at least people are trying things. Disrupting the status quo is how society moves forward, humanity never seems too comfortable sitting on its haunches (for better or worse).

The blockchain doesn't "belong" to our generation just like the internet didn't "belong" to our parent's generation even though they created it... #Blockchain #cryptocurrency

We have too many endless debates about whether it's good or bad, a scam, to energy intensive, too much skepticism, too many scars from believing in media-hyped utopias or dystopias just to see them fail. The coming generations will adopt it as if it's the most natural thing in the world and find ways to utilize it we never thought off because they will be defining what has inherent value to them. If you don't, believe that you have never experienced how the art market functions or never heard kids discuss the latest skin or emote in Fortnite...

Culture drives what we consider inherent valuable, not pure logic or academia or Adam Smith. The blockchain is made for the digital culture and what will be considered valuable (and thus per definition scarce) within that domain for reasons still to be seen.

The blockchain is a protocol, protocols are infrastructure. The primary value of the blockchain protocol is its ability to remember which is what gives it it's "physical/atomic" properties. It's not decentralization as many believe as that was already solved with the TCP/IP protocol.

So you can say it's like TCP/IP with a memory.

This also means that it's much harder to take things from the physical world and apply the blockchain as that can still be compromised.

So instead of where it will shine is in things that are created in the digital space. Crypto Kitties, Money, Digital Pokemon Cards, Documentation, Identity, Marketplaces with digital assets etc.

Everything that has inception in the digital world.

Memory of time passing seemingly gets very compressed the further back you go.

Additionally, Bitcoin is an attempt at disrupting elements of the financial world (and cryptocurrencies as-a-whole are going after ALL of finance, not just elements of it). This is _the most powerful and well-funded aspect of modern civilisation_, so there's going to be severe resistance (to put it mildly) to any threat.

It's also difficult to understand the concepts that are foundational to cryptocurrencies, and the average persons eyes glaze over (personal terminology my wife uses when I try to explain technologically difficult things that she really has no interest in) at the slightest dip into its technicalities.

Better examples may be smart phones, but mobiles have been around since the mid-80's at least (that suitcase-sized portable phone in Lethal Weapon), and laptops are of a similar vintage (my argument being that smart phones are a combination of these two existing technologies).

Smart phones also have that immediate-dopamine-hit working for their adoption rate whilst Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are a 'longer game' (arguably you could say those already on the 'inside' for crypto get the dopamine hit of profit or potential riches - rightly or wrongly, healthily or otherwise).

Think of cryptocurrency as building a brand new Central Banking and Wall Street infrastructure. 13 years is still breast-feeding against that behemoth.

When you think in those terms you realize how shameful it is that, say, HN isn't getting in on the ground floor and spawning a worker in every reader's browser to mine crypto. The energy expended to mine Bitcoin pales in comparison to the early mover opportunities lost each day from lack of action.

It was 10 years in to the dotcom era that the dotcom bubble burst, and by that time we'd had massive maturation of the technology and the start of mass adoption.

However, we're approaching 10 years since the start of the blockchain era, and there are signs that the bubble is bursting already, but in terms of progress it is nowhere near where the dotcom era had got to by this stage, and there's not much indication of anything that appears that it will be particularly long lasting or widely adopted. Sure there's niches like settlement systems and security tokens, but not something that a member of the public is going to use on a daily basis like they do with many of the internet based companies.

How much those systems are controlled by their users rather than just different concentrated groups holding a majority of power and wealth is in some ways a measure of that success. I am not too optimistic about this for bitcoin and systems based on it, but bitcoin is far from the only game in town.

Whether or not the space needs to learn every lesson, no matter how obvious, by regularly losing money reproducing each crisis in turn remains to be seen. As someone who spent a long time in finance and can see that many of the experiments/"products" in crypto are dumb and won't work, I would certainly hope we can do a bit better, but if that's what it takes, so be it.

[1] Hopefully we can at least improve some bits of the actual products and systems along the way as well as getting the basics in place, too.

The abstractions we spent the last 30 years on (operating systems, protocols, etc) will fade like musical genres. There were literaally people who spent 5+ years of their lives learning OS/2, SCO, VMS, Novell, and others. I"m optimistic about kids.

Also, there are demographic issues. Consider that aptitude is Pareto distributed, which means the population lull between millenaials and the younger zombie apocalypse generation creates a smaller total sample of people in that range, so you don't encounter as many upper percentile people in that cohort because there just aren't as many of them. Any minority demographic is necessarily going to appear less exceptional because even if the distribution is the same (pareto), you're going to encounter more of the long tail cohort, and fewer of the very tiny exceptional elite in that selection. This guy is on about a group of kids who have the same aptitude distribution as older folks, but since there are fewer of them than the mega generations like X, Y, and M , he's ignoring their exceptions and focusing on their long tail.

My concern is whether that's what they are learning; too early to tell, of course.

One thing I'm also thinking is that crypto functions like "wokeism" in the sense it seems a parallel right-wing version of the same kind of cultural reformation.

At the same time large retail biz profess their diversity credentials, their heads of research explain how crypto is on some timeline. At the same time a 20yo engages in activism for X, another engages in crypto for Y.

Do we need to "end the patriachy" or "put metriocracy on the blockchain" ?

My concern isnt just the skills issue, but also, everything bound up in the culture around it.

I think we're seeing Tech get to a level of cultural prestige that invites on-mass young-buyin, and mass cultish movements. No doubt finance experienced similar in the 80s.

But, I think, as finance people eventually learned to inculcate some level of cultural scepticism; tech seems it has yet to do so.

In otherwords, we're unprepared for this coming's generation having bought into a tech-culture landscape which is composed of scams.

In 10 years, the web went from a curiosity at CERN to transforming the global economy, and blockchain applications have much lower barriers to entry than 1990s computer hardware or network pricing. Digital computing went from Alan Turing’s papers to being a decisive factor in WWII over the same period, and similarly had much greater entry requirements.

But, a lot of us are pretty jaded by “blockchain is a game changer” with no tangible evidence beyond BTC as a highly unstable store of value and claims of some great future state.

It started as this niche academic/techno subculture thing and slowly grew over the next few years though still in relative obscurity. Then over only a few short years it exploded into the common consciousness but still most people did not use it nor have access to it. Some even ridiculed it (see Krugman & Letterman).

As we know the hype grew each year then each month and then each week. And before we knew it there were enormous amounts of money being pumped into building ludicrous businesses without a clear plan, product or use case. This was still at a time where internet access and daily usage did not exist for most people, not even in the western world.

This all came to head in the Dot Com bubble at the beginning of the new century.

And ever since we have seen mostly level headed investment and buildup of capabilities on the web. While it never went away, the type of hype cycle that was seen in the 90's never materialized to the same degree. Utility and more level headed thinking took over.

Rational (buisness) decisions have mostly been made ever since, rather than those more tending to give way to emotion and bro selling (selling a product/tech/idea without really understanding and coming to terms with the fundamentals and limitations of it).

Now, in my perspective there is some utility in crypto. I am not sure the utility is as much as has been reported, nor do I believe the nations on this planet will allow it to go as far as some believe it might simply for the fact that our societies run on taxes. And I am absolutely for any kind of restriction on any kind of crypto that relies of PoW with its enormous energy usage (we have better things to use it for).

But I do hope there will be a crash akin to the dot com bubble which will clean out the clutter a bit and leave room for the more mature and levelheaded inventors to grow out from the ashes.

We don't have to be 100% better, we have to be 0.1% better. I think that is absolutely in reach. I think that will be transformational for many. It will not bring us utopia, it might have bad side effects, hopefully the good outweighs the bad.

And is this not spurred from market desires too? How do we know the difference between genuine forces of innovation and a temporary trend?

I remember using the internet for the first time in the late 90s, it was slow and clunky and magical. We had twenty years of silicon valley startup culture, there was some fun there, but it is so tired. Crypto-communities are the most fun i've had on the internet in a long long time. And the DeFi/DAO/Ethereum stacks feel magical.

Maybe i'm wrong and it is nothing in the long term, but maybe we dont have to assume the authority of the legacy system is legitimate. Maybe the feeling of liberation it brings with it, and the love in the community, will drive the space to continue to out-perform the markets, out-innovate the fintech startups, and out-last the legacy systems.