
Ask HN: Were people as skeptical in the early Internet days as of blockchain? - maxencecornet
Inspired by this reddit thread:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;ethereum&#x2F;comments&#x2F;7rego7&#x2F;were_people_this_skeptical_in_the_early_days_of&#x2F;<p>For those of you that are in their 40&#x27;s, do you remember people being very skeptical as well?
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apohn
I think hype results in skepticism, and things can be hyped on a far larger
scale now than ever before.

If I think back to my early internet days, I remember email (Eudora!!) being
the most useful and exciting thing. After that I remember Yahoo and ICQ being
really important for me. People were certainly excited in the 90s, but I think
the hype was less around the internet in general and more around some of the
things it would enable (e.g. Gateway PCs and PCTV or whatever it was called).

I remember more hype around the CD-ROM and CD-R's than I do hype about the
internet. The capacity of CD-ROMs and the ability to play video reminds me of
the current talk about VR/AR. What we got out of CD-ROMs was Windows 95 being
easier to install and cutscenes in video games - not what happened to Edward
Furlong in the "Brainscan" movie or Lawnmower man.

Compare that to blockchain or any of the current hyped technologies like Deep
Learning or Big Data(3 years ago). "Thought leaders", tech and non-tech
companies (small and large), journalists - everybody wants to show they are
the leaders and have the answers. You then have a strong reaction of
skepticism against this.

I feel old writing this post. I remember Brainscan and hoping something like
that was right around the corner...ouch.

------
Finnucane
People are always skeptical of new technology. And not entirely without
reason. It's not always clear what the advantages are (early versions of new
things sometimes are not actually better than the old thing), or what the cost
will be: progress doesn't come for free. In the early days of the Internet,
part of the problem was that most people just didn't have a way to access it
until there were commercial ISPs, and the Web made it relatively easy to find
and share stuff. And of course, new things often come with a lot of hype, that
may take a long time to really pan out.

And nowadays we sometimes use the phrase 'the killer appp--the function that
clicks with the new technology that drives adoption.

So, if you really want people to get people interested in blockchain, find a
way to use it to distribute porn.

~~~
selmat
"find a way to use it to distribute porn."

this made my day :)

i think if content can be verified via blockchain that doesn't contains any
malware it would be much more preferred.

------
hluska
I grew up in Regina, Canada. Regina is a rather conservative big Government
town where things change even slower than the climate. Consequently, my
experience may not be typical so do with this what you will.

The shortest possible answer is yeah, people were very sceptical of the
Internet in the early days. In the early 90s, I remember one very senior
government official who my parents knew say "there is nothing of use on the
internet." I would have been about fourteen then and had never even imagined
such blasphemy, but here was a guy who had done well for himself shitting all
over the only place I had ever wanted to work!

I remember how dismissive my Dad was of email when his employer gave him his
first email account. "Why the hell did they do this to me?" he'd fume.
"Interoffice mail used to take a few days, but at least I could open the
damned thing." Yet a decade later, he retired and bought himself a computer so
he could keep using email!

Ky biggest takeaway from those years is that only the most technical people
had any vision of what the web could become. In that early state, the web kind
of sucked. It was hard to even go online and once you were there it was even
harder to find anything of value. Thanks to some true visionaries, the web has
become indispensable. And I'm convinced that the same kinds of visionaries
will do the same with blockchain.

------
tabeth
It seems that the majority of "legitimate" uses surrounding blockchain concern
"trust", or rather try to eliminate mechanisms such that trust is inherent.

Imagine some authority, perhaps a non-profit that was 100% trustworthy. What
could blockchain [*] do that said "authority" could not? I'm curious if
blockchain could be used within an organization to make an organization itself
trustworthy, as opposed to make trustworthy tools.

\- keep in mind even if decentralized, many blockchain tools will likely have
some authority managing it, or have mechanisms such that a small collitation
could take control

\---

I'm really curious if blockchain is superior to a traditional approach for the
following scenario:

1\. You're a nonprofit

2\. You take donations on your website.

3\. You advertise that money donated will 100% be used for a stated purpose
(categorical in nature).

4\. You also say that you can see exactly when your money is spent and how it
is spent, including the quantity.

I see a way to build this with traditional tools, but it seems complicated and
also is prone to fraud. The problem with using Bitcoin is that your endowment
would be too volatile for your finance team to really manage. I suppose the
nonprofit could do an ICO, but you don't want people to actually own a portion
of your non-profit (as they cannot, by definition).

How can you ensure compliance, have transparency and minimize complexity?

------
sharemywin
\- I remember getting on mosaic and thinking what is that ugly thing. Besides
there are plenty of free editors out there already.

-couple years later, the internet that could be a pretty cool yellow pages.

\- couple years later, I remember a lot of people saying why would anyone buy
XYZ online with out touching it first.

------
itamarst
The Internet was very clearly useful in many ways, from very early on.

Blockchain has no real use cases so far except libertarian fantasies and get-
rich-quick schemes.

~~~
sharemywin
nasdaq thinks there's a couple:

[http://www.nasdaq.com/article/4-innovative-use-cases-for-
blo...](http://www.nasdaq.com/article/4-innovative-use-cases-for-blockchain-
cm901636)

30 non financial use-cases: [https://letstalkpayments.com/30-non-financial-
use-cases-of-b...](https://letstalkpayments.com/30-non-financial-use-cases-of-
blockchain-technology-infographic/)

deloitte 5 use cases: [https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/financial-
services/art...](https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/financial-
services/articles/5-blockchain-use-cases-in-financial-services.html)

~~~
SirLJ
Blockchain is been around for more than 25 years and nothing practical at
scale build yet, except for the token bubble...

------
potta_coffee
I don't see much skepticism about blockchain technology itself. Skepticism
regarding the value of bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are warranted, IMO.

------
babygoat
What average person has a need for blockchain? I seriously don't get the
comparison.

~~~
maxencecornet
>What average person has a need for blockchain?

What average person had a need for internet in 1994 ? People don't used and
don't use Internet as it, average joe use internet because of the applications
running on it.

Pretty much the same things with blockchain tech

>I seriously don't get the comparison.

A blockchain is a public distributed database, internet was a decentralized
public network

The trustlessness linked to the use of public blockchain is a major novelty in
the tech world.

~~~
BatFastard
My biggest issue with blockchain is scalablity, which is proving to be a
bigger and bigger problem as more people are into cryptocurrencies.

Are there actual solutions to this problem?

~~~
maxencecornet
>My biggest issue with blockchain is scalablity

Plasma MVP (built upon Ethereum blockchain) was just released. Plasma is
supposed to be able to handle more then 1 million transactions per second,
which is way more then what Visa handle right now

[https://github.com/omisego/plasma-mvp](https://github.com/omisego/plasma-mvp)

[https://blog.omisego.network/construction-of-a-plasma-
chain-...](https://blog.omisego.network/construction-of-a-plasma-
chain-0x1-614f6ebd1612)

~~~
BatFastard
Very cool, but as any chain, is not block chain only as strong as its
strongest(or slowest in this case) link?

