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Comment by WhitneyLand | Hacker News Reader

There are countless examples where a promising innovation, or even a seemingly useless but novel result became important at a much later date than 10 years.

Even the Internet was criticized by some after 10 years for failing to live up to “change everything” hype, and it’s true it hadn’t really close to doing so at the time. Some companies like Blockbuster Video weren’t a bit concerned for quite a while.

To me the current state of blockchain applications doesn’t tell us much about what it’s ultimate utility will end up being.

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> There are countless examples where a promising innovation, or even a seemingly useless but novel result became important at a much later date than 10 years.

While that might be true, that doesn't mean that a lack of success actually indicates success. That'd be a useless tautology.

More importantly, earlier innovations that took their time usually at least had a clear proposition of value. When electricity was introduced it took decades before businesses had adjusted their manufacturing and supply lines to the new technology, but everybody could trivially see that powering things remotely and sending information over long distances is pretty darn useful.

There is no such hypothetical justification for blockchain technology, or at least there isn't in many cases were people rabidly keep advocating for it.

As the author points out, in many fields the blockhain technology is less energy efficient, slower, and provides the opposite of what most customers want.

That is

Of course I agree it doesn’t indicate success, I assume you understand I was only making the weaker claim, that lack of success at 10 years doesn’t set any ceiling on ultimate success.

Just saying it’s not unprecedented as other concepts have, however unlikely, eventually found success, and there are maybe a few parallels with basic research. Some computer science has come out of all of this already, some of which might be pieces to a puzzle we can’t entirely see yet.

The iPhone was first released 10 years ago. 10 years is a massive amount of time in tech.

The iPhone wasnt an innovation, it was an iteration.

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