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Fourteen years after Tim Berners Lee released his www app was, let’s call it 2005ish.

I’d say the impact of http on the world was pretty damn life changing by 2005. Linux? Fourteen years after it was released it had entirely disrupted not just the commercial Unix world but was on its way to becoming the most widely deployed operating system on the planet.

Bitcoin? Eh. I suppose ransomware authors would still be using green dot to try and collect their take if it hadn’t shown up. YouTube creators would have a harder time financing their passion without the sweet cash infusion from random vc backed crypto currency exchanges. Many quadrillion hashes would have sadly been skipped in the small chance they would have resulted in the correct number of leading zeroes.

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We're how many thousand years in to having gold and honestly nobody has figured out a practical use for it - it ranges from put it in a vault to show off how spangly it is. Still big money in digging it up, despite the utility of glitter and yellow paint.

It is clear at this point there is a multi-billion dollar market for cryptocurrencies that isn't going away (I choose my words carefully, I don't like the long term prospects of any particular token). Wild success and a use case has been demonstrated already, even if a lot of people don't like the idea that burning energy is its own reward. The world has changed substantially because of it.

Well, to start, 10% of gold production goes to the electronics industry. Therefore, one could say that gold was used to manufacture products we use to serve and view the very site on which we are discussing this topic.

I agree, the world has changed substantially because of cryptocurrencies. The amount of breathless hype has reached critical levels. As for use case, well, I hear that ransomware is now a multi billion dollar industry. Congratulations?

How many millennia did it take between gold being a big deal and the development of electronics? Two? If bitcoin finds a practical use in the next century it'll be far speedier.

It was truly the store of value before people invented paper money and later digital bank accounts. That was the killer practical purpose for gold, silver, etc. - it was concentrated value that you could easily split, transport (compared to other options) and store. So it was serving a very practical purpose for millenia as you say, and there really were no options or alternatives that came close to it at the time. Historically it retained some of that allure, but now who cares? Now it seems to be a cute historical artifact of its past very tangible purpose in society.

Fast forward to today, cryptocurrencies are just a twist on the existing financial system, which already has plenty of options for store of value, electronic trading, other things we have today in our networked world. You can argue how much of an improvement it brings (I think not much), but it is 100% not the killer value store that precious metals used to be in their heyday (when they had no alternatives).

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