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In 1980 packet switching had existed for 20 years already. The public Internet wouldn’t emerge for more than a decade after that—and it would take yet another 2

In 1980 packet switching had existed for 20 years already. The public Internet wouldn’t emerge for more than a decade after that—and it would take yet another 20 years for the true power of packet-switched networks to be realized, in the form of mobile Internet. In 2000 neural networks had existed for more than 50 years. More than 20 years later their full potential is finally being realized, and many would say it is still early days. It’s naive to think that you can predict the future course of a technology simply based on the fact that it has already existed for a certain amount of time.

mplewis 3y ago
[flagged]
- legutierr 3y ago
  It’s happening right now.
  - mtnGoat 3y ago
    Can you elaborate on this?
    - TimeBearingDown 3y ago
      From a prior thread that didn’t get any constructive engagement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39205762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39205762 Essentially Ethereum can be used to codify financial contracts in order to provide a level of trust where one does not otherwise exist.
      - crummy 3y ago
        > You could wire together a group of houses or neighborhoods with generators and batteries and make the electric company redundant by establishing contracts which buy and sell electricity between participants at rates which adjust in response to demand, forecast, and each battery’s reserves. how would you handle spoofing? e.g. whatever data source you use to figure out how much energy I'm generating, I just put fake data into it? I guess you don't need to worry about that if you trust your neighbours. but then you could just use a traditional database if you all trust each other.
        CaptainZapp 3y ago
        You can even run a conventional database if you don't trust each other. The only party requiring trust us the one managing the database. Wirks pretty well in the real world.
      - troupo 3y ago
        It doesn't. Let's take that comment. > You could wire together a group of houses or neighborhoods with generators and batteries and make the electric company redundant by establishing contracts which buy and sell electricity between participants at rates which adjust in response to demand, forecast, and each battery’s reserves. Who is this you, why would this group of houses trust you and not their established providers. And how will this group of houses verify that your contract even works (forget about "works correctly", start with just "works"). > Essentially Ethereum can be used to codify financial contracts in order to provide a level of trust where one does not otherwise exist. No it can't. These are not contracts. These are programs written in esotheric programming languages that work only as long as there's a connection to the things they "manage". They are unenforceable, have significant issues with versioning and bugs (once deployed, its deployed forever), have no bearing on the physical world etc.
    - legutierr 3y ago
      https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs#stablecoin-finance https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs#stablecoin-finance
- jMyles 3y ago
  If anything, a technology demonstrating its capacity to continue to function normally in the face of illicit use cases is an indication of its viability for inclusion in the next human chapter. If you tell us that a technology seems to preclude love, or creativity, or good health... sure, that warrants examination and possibly intervention. But illicit behavior? In an environment where some perfectly sociable and laudable behavior is illicit? Who cares?! It's been crystal clear since the first whiffs of what has come to be called the Streisand effect that the internet does not tolerate censorship, including by states. What good is served by prioritizing consideration of the throes of deprecation of the shitty legacy institutions from which the internet is finally freeing us? (I'm not trying to cheerlead crypto here per se; I think currency is broadly stupid and subject to eventual deprecation for all the same reasons that fiat currency is leaving first). This comes up in every discussion, every single time, without qualification or explanation, as if we all understand by default the importance of first adjudicating the legality or illegality (presumably in accordance with each of the tens of thousands of states which claim authority to make this designation) of a use case of a technology before we can celebrate the effort and achievement of the authors. And I'm concerned that this is demoralizing and counter-productive.
threeseed 3y ago
Crypto-currency isn't about the technology. It's a political experiment centred around replacing the existing financial system. And the mistake there is that people in the crypto space are ignorant about how that world works. Namely that there is such a large overlap with the government that you're in essence trying to disrupt governments. Which is a losing battle.
- reidjs 3y ago
  I don’t think it’s a battle. At least one government has adopted cryptocurrency to a small extent. No technology is “about” the technology, the other poster mentioned the Internet, very few care about how it works, they care about what they can with it.
  - farrarstan 3y ago
    [dead]
acdha 3y ago
Those comparisons are incredibly mismatched. In 1980 a computer cost as much as a car, and network connections were incredibly expensive and slow. Bill Gates, child of wealth and privilege, famously had to use a shared computer paid for by his elite school because even the child of an IBM board member wouldn’t have access to a computer! The microprocessor revolution unfolded in the 80s, however, so even your timeline is off by over a decade because people paid money to get online because things like email, telnet, Usenet, and FTP were immediately useful. By 1995, the web was already multiple years into extreme growth – very little of which was directly related to selling as opposed to all of the things you could do with it. Nobody was saying you should buy a modem and sit on it before reselling it at a profit, they were talking about all of the things you could do once you had one! Similarly, nobody doubted that neural networks were capable of very interesting things - the holdup was the level of processing power needed to run them. As soon as that changes, useful applications abounded. Those make quite the contrast with bitcoin which has been universally available to a much, much larger population and had truly massive resources available, but almost no meaningful impact because it doesn’t give most people anything new or better. The few businesses which aren’t trying to market it and still accept it almost universally convert BTC into real currency as soon as they receive it, companies like Western Union and Visa haven’t felt the need to lower rates, and to the extent that PayPal is reconsidering screwing everyone so aggressively it’s because of Venmo and Stripe, not Bitcoin.
- mattdesl 3y ago
  > Similarly, nobody doubted that neural networks were capable of very interesting things - the holdup was the level of processing power needed to run them. As soon as that changes, useful applications abounded. This is incorrect. AI has gone through multiple ‘winters’ where there were serious doubts and pessimistic attitudes toward its capabilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
  - acdha 3y ago
    Yes, I’m aware of AI winters but that doesn’t affect the point I was making: people knew neural networks were capable of the task since neuroscientists were studying how our own brains used them, but they were computationally daunting. “AI winter” didn’t mean that everyone gave up and assumed the theists were right that some supernatural power was the key part, it meant that developing commercially-viable technologies was harder than hoped. That’s where the contrast with Bitcoin is so pronounced: in that case, the limitation isn’t technical but political - it’s been available to anyone who wants it for 15 years but most people don’t want it because you have to strongly share a certain ideology to prefer a slower, less secure, more expensive financial system. There is no technical improvement which will suddenly boost Bitcoin adoption the way GPUs and smart algorithms boosted neural networks because the inefficiency is the point.
ipython 3y ago
IMO, your timelines are way off and the goalposts are totally skewed. In 1980, the Commodore 64 hadn't even been released yet. Even so, 15 years later, in 1995, almost 15% of adults had dialup access to the Internet. The real goalpost here is the advent of the WWW. TBL released his paper and source code for the WWW on April 30, 1993. On that date, all that existed was an idea and a command line browser. Most people only knew the web in those early years as "that thing you could reach by telnet to info.cern.ch". Even given this modest start, fifteen years later, in 2008, nearly 75% of adults used the internet according to a Pew research study (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/06/26/americans-internet-access-2000-2015/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/06/26/americans-in...). In 2008, we already saw the emergence of the e-commerce market, with upstart Amazon already commanding a 1% share of the entire retail market (to put in perspective, that grew to ~6% by 2019, according to Census and Morgan Stanley data: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chart-shows-just-big-amazon-retail-211017052.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chart-shows-just-big-amazon-r...). Heck, by 2008, you could watch a movie instantaneously on your TV without renting or buying the DVD! (https://web.archive.org/web/20080525201828/http://www.netflix.com/NetflixReadyDevices?tb=what https://web.archive.org/web/20080525201828/http://www.netfli...) So yes, you can determine something about the relative strength of a particular technology by the speed it is adopted in the marketplace. Fifteen years is a long time, and even taking into account the slow Internet speeds between 1993 and 2008, people found enough value in the Web to use it on a daily basis. I don't see the same adoption curve for cryptocurrencies.

mplewis 3y ago

[flagged]

legutierr 3y ago
It’s happening right now.
- mtnGoat 3y ago
  Can you elaborate on this?
  - TimeBearingDown 3y ago
    From a prior thread that didn’t get any constructive engagement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39205762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39205762 Essentially Ethereum can be used to codify financial contracts in order to provide a level of trust where one does not otherwise exist.
    - crummy 3y ago
      > You could wire together a group of houses or neighborhoods with generators and batteries and make the electric company redundant by establishing contracts which buy and sell electricity between participants at rates which adjust in response to demand, forecast, and each battery’s reserves. how would you handle spoofing? e.g. whatever data source you use to figure out how much energy I'm generating, I just put fake data into it? I guess you don't need to worry about that if you trust your neighbours. but then you could just use a traditional database if you all trust each other.
      - CaptainZapp 3y ago
        You can even run a conventional database if you don't trust each other. The only party requiring trust us the one managing the database. Wirks pretty well in the real world.
    - troupo 3y ago
      It doesn't. Let's take that comment. > You could wire together a group of houses or neighborhoods with generators and batteries and make the electric company redundant by establishing contracts which buy and sell electricity between participants at rates which adjust in response to demand, forecast, and each battery’s reserves. Who is this you, why would this group of houses trust you and not their established providers. And how will this group of houses verify that your contract even works (forget about "works correctly", start with just "works"). > Essentially Ethereum can be used to codify financial contracts in order to provide a level of trust where one does not otherwise exist. No it can't. These are not contracts. These are programs written in esotheric programming languages that work only as long as there's a connection to the things they "manage". They are unenforceable, have significant issues with versioning and bugs (once deployed, its deployed forever), have no bearing on the physical world etc.
  - legutierr 3y ago
    https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs#stablecoin-finance https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs#stablecoin-finance
jMyles 3y ago
If anything, a technology demonstrating its capacity to continue to function normally in the face of illicit use cases is an indication of its viability for inclusion in the next human chapter. If you tell us that a technology seems to preclude love, or creativity, or good health... sure, that warrants examination and possibly intervention. But illicit behavior? In an environment where some perfectly sociable and laudable behavior is illicit? Who cares?! It's been crystal clear since the first whiffs of what has come to be called the Streisand effect that the internet does not tolerate censorship, including by states. What good is served by prioritizing consideration of the throes of deprecation of the shitty legacy institutions from which the internet is finally freeing us? (I'm not trying to cheerlead crypto here per se; I think currency is broadly stupid and subject to eventual deprecation for all the same reasons that fiat currency is leaving first). This comes up in every discussion, every single time, without qualification or explanation, as if we all understand by default the importance of first adjudicating the legality or illegality (presumably in accordance with each of the tens of thousands of states which claim authority to make this designation) of a use case of a technology before we can celebrate the effort and achievement of the authors. And I'm concerned that this is demoralizing and counter-productive.

threeseed 3y ago

Crypto-currency isn't about the technology. It's a political experiment centred around replacing the existing financial system. And the mistake there is that people in the crypto space are ignorant about how that world works. Namely that there is such a large overlap with the government that you're in essence trying to disrupt governments. Which is a losing battle.

reidjs 3y ago
I don’t think it’s a battle. At least one government has adopted cryptocurrency to a small extent. No technology is “about” the technology, the other poster mentioned the Internet, very few care about how it works, they care about what they can with it.
- farrarstan 3y ago
  [dead]

acdha 3y ago

Those comparisons are incredibly mismatched. In 1980 a computer cost as much as a car, and network connections were incredibly expensive and slow. Bill Gates, child of wealth and privilege, famously had to use a shared computer paid for by his elite school because even the child of an IBM board member wouldn’t have access to a computer! The microprocessor revolution unfolded in the 80s, however, so even your timeline is off by over a decade because people paid money to get online because things like email, telnet, Usenet, and FTP were immediately useful. By 1995, the web was already multiple years into extreme growth – very little of which was directly related to selling as opposed to all of the things you could do with it. Nobody was saying you should buy a modem and sit on it before reselling it at a profit, they were talking about all of the things you could do once you had one! Similarly, nobody doubted that neural networks were capable of very interesting things - the holdup was the level of processing power needed to run them. As soon as that changes, useful applications abounded. Those make quite the contrast with bitcoin which has been universally available to a much, much larger population and had truly massive resources available, but almost no meaningful impact because it doesn’t give most people anything new or better. The few businesses which aren’t trying to market it and still accept it almost universally convert BTC into real currency as soon as they receive it, companies like Western Union and Visa haven’t felt the need to lower rates, and to the extent that PayPal is reconsidering screwing everyone so aggressively it’s because of Venmo and Stripe, not Bitcoin.

mattdesl 3y ago
> Similarly, nobody doubted that neural networks were capable of very interesting things - the holdup was the level of processing power needed to run them. As soon as that changes, useful applications abounded. This is incorrect. AI has gone through multiple ‘winters’ where there were serious doubts and pessimistic attitudes toward its capabilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
- acdha 3y ago
  Yes, I’m aware of AI winters but that doesn’t affect the point I was making: people knew neural networks were capable of the task since neuroscientists were studying how our own brains used them, but they were computationally daunting. “AI winter” didn’t mean that everyone gave up and assumed the theists were right that some supernatural power was the key part, it meant that developing commercially-viable technologies was harder than hoped. That’s where the contrast with Bitcoin is so pronounced: in that case, the limitation isn’t technical but political - it’s been available to anyone who wants it for 15 years but most people don’t want it because you have to strongly share a certain ideology to prefer a slower, less secure, more expensive financial system. There is no technical improvement which will suddenly boost Bitcoin adoption the way GPUs and smart algorithms boosted neural networks because the inefficiency is the point.

ipython 3y ago

IMO, your timelines are way off and the goalposts are totally skewed. In 1980, the Commodore 64 hadn't even been released yet. Even so, 15 years later, in 1995, almost 15% of adults had dialup access to the Internet. The real goalpost here is the advent of the WWW. TBL released his paper and source code for the WWW on April 30, 1993. On that date, all that existed was an idea and a command line browser. Most people only knew the web in those early years as "that thing you could reach by telnet to info.cern.ch". Even given this modest start, fifteen years later, in 2008, nearly 75% of adults used the internet according to a Pew research study (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/06/26/americans-internet-access-2000-2015/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/06/26/americans-in...). In 2008, we already saw the emergence of the e-commerce market, with upstart Amazon already commanding a 1% share of the entire retail market (to put in perspective, that grew to ~6% by 2019, according to Census and Morgan Stanley data: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chart-shows-just-big-amazon-retail-211017052.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chart-shows-just-big-amazon-r...). Heck, by 2008, you could watch a movie instantaneously on your TV without renting or buying the DVD! (https://web.archive.org/web/20080525201828/http://www.netflix.com/NetflixReadyDevices?tb=what https://web.archive.org/web/20080525201828/http://www.netfli...) So yes, you can determine something about the relative strength of a particular technology by the speed it is adopted in the marketplace. Fifteen years is a long time, and even taking into account the slow Internet speeds between 1993 and 2008, people found enough value in the Web to use it on a daily basis. I don't see the same adoption curve for cryptocurrencies.