We've seen "the bubble" being poked sharply from the inside with relative trivialities like cryptokitties. We've also seen the more blunt effect of undermining prohibition policies - access to a wide variety of (psychoactive and other) forbidden medicines has been difficult to achieve since the garden of eden; this seems like a breakthrough to me.
But yes, your larger point is sound: broader worldwide adoption hasn't happened, at least yet. I'm confident, though, that the next cryptokitties won't be cryptokitties and that the next OpenBazaar will be more effectual. We'll see.
I don't think this is a well-defined question, at least as you've posed it.
I'm not waiting. I'm taking advantage of the fact that the chaotic redistribution of spending power - caused by the introduction of bitcoin into the world economy - has made funding available to do work that I have long wanted to do. I plan to work full-time at NuCypher for at least another year.
People who are actively using this technology to purchase forbidden fruits over the internet aren't waiting - they're using this technology in life changing ways all the time.
People who (and I know this is a silly one) play cryptokitties aren't waiting - they're making use of this tech, even if it might seem meaningless to you and me.
Maybe you're part of the much larger portion of the population who are still waiting for something that is personally interesting to you to come out of blockchain tech. That's totally cool!
I can't meaningfully ask you how much longer you're willing to wait, because I already know the answer: you'll wait until something that speaks to you becomes available, and then you'll consider it. Right?
Tim Berners-Lee created the first hypertext database called Enquire that was similar to a wiki in 1980. How many years did it take before e-commerce on the web was successful?
Except the status of blockchain over the last decade hasn't been a handful of hackers thinking about systems for internal use at CERN, it's been an ecosystem of ventures raising enormous amounts of cash for what they consider to be permanent systems with long term value.
The browser first became accessible to the general public in August 1991, and the graphic browser in September 1993. Amazon was founded in mid 1994 and had a revenue generating website delivering books from a million product catalogue the following year.
This comment is similar to looking at the Netscape browser in 1994 and asking who has successfully used a browser in industry. Or, like insisting in 2001-2002 that all dot-coms were like WebVan or pets.com and the Internet was just a fad and didn't provide any real value.
If you have any understanding of the way technology is developed and becomes commercialized (hint: google "gartner hype cycle") you'll probably realize that we've passed the peak of inflated expectations and are firmly in the trough of disillusionment when it comes to crypto. Not every technology makes it to the plateau of productivity, but crypto has a pretty damn good chance of doing so, considering how much innovation and research is currently taking place.
The Netscape browser, and the concept of the internet in normal peoples' homes, and the concept of e-commerce all proved themselves in less time than blockchain tech has now had to prove itself. Maybe that's because blockchain tech will never succeed.
I don't appreciate your condescension, for example:
> If you have any understanding of the way technology is developed and becomes commercialized (hint: google "gartner hype cycle")
I understand these things just fine, thank you very much, and I'm asking you for a explanation why blockchain tech is going to succeed despite its having failed for far more years than comparable technologies have failed in the past. It's been a decade. Where's the beef?
Why innovation? What research? It's so much hoo-ha over really expenaive append-only databases. It's been over ten years, the best anyone has come up with are ledgers, contracts that trigger when you don't want them to and can never be renegotiated, and pump and dump schemes. It's time to move on.
