I think you'd appreciate my rant covering much of the same history and making virtually identical points with some data to back it up:
https://kkrants.com/blockchain-the-most-poorly-adopted-platf...
https://kkrants.com/blockchain-the-most-poorly-adopted-platf...
I find it interesting that you're bullish about the space but seem to be one of the few people asking the most important question: why should anyone join? I'm a couple of years older than you and it's been really weird feeling like that's strangely absent — things like CompuServ, the web, social media, smartphones, etc. all had such clear answers for that that people would be asking for help signin up because they knew they wanted it because it'd help them do something (school, trading stocks, gaming, reaching customers, etc.) but weren't sure the best option or something like that. It's been really weird to me that the answer remains nonobvious. I'd be happy even if it was as simple as “we want to turn PayPal into a smoldering hole in the ground” because a) such a deserving company and b) anyone who hears it would know immediately whether it's something they'd like — and that means that people in the space would know they need to hit certain cost and ease of use thresholds.
That's just it - people went through A LOT to get on the web in the early days but the value was so immediately compelling and obvious they considered it worth the effort. As I note in the rant corporations were snatching up their .com within a year or two. How many legit companies have their domain and presence on ENS (which itself has been around for almost five years now)?
Whereas for ENS you have something real to compare to with .com, including registration data. ENS does seem to be getting some adoption mostly at an individual/celebrity level. Here's the leaderboard of top ENS users by # of Twitter followers: https://ethleaderboard.xyz/
I also think the ENS community in general is curious about the questions you're asking. Fundamentally ENS/DNS is pretty boring, so it's hard to get too wildly speculative.
Chains are difficult to compare popularity because of the anonymous nature and how “users” are considered. How do you translate transactions per day and active addresses into users? Almost all users have more than one address. Transfers from hot to cold storage for a single user count as a transaction and involve multiple addresses, as one example.
Bitcoin is 13 years old. Ethereum is seven years old. ENS is five years old. Yet I can’t go to Toyota.eth and learn about their new models or whatever like I could with toyota.com in 1995 (18 months after the web was released).
Note I use the Toyota.com example because when my sister and I first got the internet in rural Wisconsin in 1995/1996 we used to watch TV with a pencil and paper to look for the fine print at the bottom of the screen in hopes for a new web address to visit. Toyota.com was one I remember writing down (for some reason). We thought it was so neat you could see something on TV, type a few letters in the computer, and get “taken” right to it immediately.
Pick a handful of $bigcorps you can think of and hit the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. You’ll find out the vast majority of the Fortune 500 had a website up at a .com within a few years (archive starts in ‘96, I believe). Not to mention the millions of users that had been building websites on geocities and elsewhere since ‘95.
By 2006 the web had over 85 million websites. In 1998 (using five years of ENS) there were over 2 million (including Google). There are currently 247 thousand ENS owners. 13 year old platform. Five year old service. Once again a fraction of adoption when compared to the web over the same time span.
Don’t take this the wrong way but a leaderboard of celebrities with Twitter accounts that starts with Paris Hilton isn’t going to change any minds on the credibility of the platform. Rather the opposite. Frankly anyone who thinks Paris Hilton being the leading proponent of a five year old technology platform is a good thing is either desperate or delusional.
It validates the huckster hype perspective. She was on late night TV recently in a very awkward “interview” promoting NFTs. Many have commented it resembled a video one might see released by someone in a hostage situation reading a propaganda statement [1][2][3].
In any case I’d be more interested to see an analysis of those top accounts and what percentage are actively selling NFTs or any other crypto-something. I’m betting it’s extremely high. Otherwise, there's always the Fyre Fest angle where most celebrities will sell anything with no due diligence or scruples whatsoever as long as the check (in fiat, of course) clears.
ENS is not boring - having an ENS address is a marketing tool to the cryptosphere for whatever you’re trying to sell them. This is one area where it’s identical to DNS.
[1] https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/55313/1...
[2] https://wegotthiscovered.com/news/jimmy-fallon-conflict-of-i...
[3] https://www.pcgamer.com/paris-hilton-and-jimmy-fallon-showin...
Your examples about web dev in the 90s got me wondering "what does Coinbase do today with ENS?". They're fans of ENS, surely whatever's great about ENS, Coinbase must be using it.
Well, as of today their ENS profile isn't anything radical [1], just an address, image, and link to their ENS delegate page.
That gets me thinking more about toyota.com. Do you think they had internal sites and computer resources before their public website? Just makes me wonder where their "toyota.com" site came from, was it as simple as "they heard about the web and then BAM immediately built a website". Wary of doing mental gymnastics myself tho, maybe this all just does mean crypto stuff is overhyped and not very useful.
As a user, I find it fun to chat with other crypto peeps about what they're doing...but talking to the outside world seems challenging. I can't really explain how "CompuServechain" isn't just a waste of time...but I'm having fun so I just keep doing that. I got a site setup on IPFS and connected to a .eth domain!
Maybe the difference is now people aren't coming to you for help with crypto, whereas maybe they were with CompuServe and smartphones? So you're playing a different role.
Oh you might get a kick out of this index of all decentralized ENS websites: https://esteroids.eth.limo/#/
The only requirement I know is that it's directed through a .eth, so the site itself may be boring. But most sites in the index seem to be hosted on IPFS and some even ask for a wallet to have app functions.
Thanks for providing the link; the popular selection[1] is most interesting. The entire space has gone so meta (a little on the nose) most don't even realize it... Imagine if all the internet offered for the first 13 years of it's life was different ways to sell you more internet. That's what the entire space looks like at this point and this link is yet another example - there are maybe three instances of destinations that I could see being even remotely useful, interesting, or usable to anyone outside of the cryptosphere.
I've been really excited about the space since at least 2017. After five years without a single "I can't live without this" moment that excitement has waned significantly.
I realize this may seem like moving the goalposts -- but have you thought about comparing to the development of the internet instead of web? Arpanet 1971 means 13 years in is 1984. I figure you've thought this through so will have some good points for why web/1991 is a better analogy than arpanet/1971.
All the stuff you wrote here is really good. Could be a blog post instead of these more ephemeral comments.
Agree with your assessment that 100 million is an upper bound. I am curious about a deeper analysis as well that involves defining what "real users" are and then seeing how many transactions/wallets meet that criteria. i.e. of that "100 million", how many of them are simply buying and hodling? How many have done a non-exchange transaction (i.e. bought a thing, not coins. Buying NFTs counts! Or a pizza, or buying software, or staking or something)
The comparison to Diner's club is also relevant. 20 years from zero to 51% of all Americans.
Just getting to your "Why has blockchain user adoption been so terrible and what can we do about it?" section and will edit after that.
Edit: Well worth the read. If anything, the title and top image were a bit clickbaity, but the article itself was great, all the way through to the end.
Overall, the key question you point to is "Why did the web grow 10x faster than blockchain? Facebook 15x, and mobile 35x faster?"
I'm curious about this! Is there a recent technology that did grow at 10x over 13 years that we could learn from? Another way to look at this is blockchain is growing at 23% YOY over the last 13 years. What technologies should we compare it to?
Just to pull on the thread, is blockchain more like "hard tech"? If so, that would be really odd since it's not "hard tech". What has EV growth been like?
Here's a chart [1] from [2] that says about 17 million EVs have been sold since 2012. Let's call that 13 years for the sake of keeping the math the same, but the web grew 100x as fast. OK so cryptocurrency is growing about order of magnitude faster than EVs, but why is it slower than the web? What else develops at a speed that's 10x faster than the growth of EVs, but still slower than the web itself?
[1] https://www.ev-volumes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/WW-K-6... [2]
What's interesting about public blockchain data (from a node directly or something like Glassnode) is that the transaction data is so readily available. We can easily analyze transactions and unique addresses. Therefore transaction rates and volumes, long with unique to/from addresses, allow for ready analysis of adoption across the entire chain. For example, Polygon has relatively low trade volume but is very popular for smart contracts (applications). Because of this the ATH high daily transaction count is roughly 9x Ethereum even though Ethereum is considered to be more "popular".
I don't have any better or more valid comparisons for blockchain than what I've presented in that rant. Certainly open to any suggestions. That said, I think there's probably a valid internet law that can be derived stating something like "A new technology paradigm either reaches 1 billion users inside of 13 years or becomes irrelevant" (with the web setting the benchmark at 1B in 13 yr).
Appreciate the feedback on image and title. Perhaps a little clickbaity but I feel the premise is original and I establish some bonafides immediately.
The web and mobile were absolutely hard tech. The majority of web users went from dialup ISPs to cable, DSL, etc. Many thousands of truck rolls, ditches dug, submarine cables laid, increasingly scalable servers, the C10k problem[1], fiber optical cabling and optical switching innovation, etc. The list is almost endless.
Mobile - remember upon the exclusive release of the iPhone on AT&T and the network practically collapsed in major cities[2]? The success of mobile depended on massive build out of additional cellular infrastructure, back hauls, new spectrum auctions, the sun-setting of analog TV broadcasts, etc. Look at the standards (and component standards) for 2G-5G. I'd say that alone makes it hard tech.
EVs are a really hard (potentially invalid) comparison if for no other reason than the average car on the road in the US is 12.1 years old[3]. I don't know how I would start looking at EV adoption for comparison with that thrown in the mix.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/technology/companies/03at...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/28/cars-on-american-roads-keep-...
Edit: thinking of other technology adoption curves. Faster than EVs but slower than web and mobile. Thinking of finance too. What's the adoption of NFCs/touchless payments/chips look like? What about the rise of microlending/lending club etc?
Ethereum came along in 2015 and introduced the concept of the Ethereum Virtual Machine and smart contracts. Now "blockchain" is a bona fide platform where people can leverage Ethereum and the underlying blockchain network to build things. Another question - why did it take six years for blockchain technology to progress from digital cash to platform?
Now seven years after that even when combining digital cash (payments), "store of value"/gambling (trading, speculation), and all things smart contract (NFTs, DAO, ENS, microlending, etc) there are still at best 100 million total users for all of these use cases combined.