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Comment by leifg | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder with these things: what is the deadline after which you are allowed to say "There is no value".

It has been almost 14 years since the inception of Bitcoin. There is nuance to this timeline that's why I usually use the launch of Ethereum as a starting point (~7 years If I recall correctly). Nevertheless so far nothing substantial running in production has come out of it Blockchain technology.

The typical response then is "well it takes time there is a lot of potential". I mean yeah but if you compare it to something like contactless payments or ride sharing apps these products have moved a lot faster and now have high user adoption.

So again: At what point can we just ignore all these Blockchain prophets that say "just wait the innovation is around the corner". 10 years, 20 years?

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Technically 25 years since Hashcash was first proposed. I'd argue it could have had value sticking to that original application in preventing network spam, but instead it turns out people are more interested in storing the proof-of-work tokens on a blockchain and selling them, as if collecting and trading postage stamps had become more widespread than actually sending mail with them, to the extent that at least some people and a few entire countries proposed replacing currency with postage stamps.

Something arbitrary with no value went from a random Internet forum to $300b market cap and a legal currency for a nation-state. That’s something!

I don’t know what’s would be a better outcome.

Did you expect it to be world reserve currency in a decade? Replace the 5000 years gold? Upend the global banking system? Render the IMF obsolete? Make nation-states think twice about waging war without taxation?

I mean - surely you aren’t comparing these world-shattering outcomes to a mobile app that doesn’t make money after that long!

I should have said "Blockchain applications outside of cryptocurrency" but as you seem to equate the two let's talk about that.

A good metric is: "people are using it".

That is not the case for any cryptocurrency (yes and that includes El Salvador). I frequently wire money across borders and cryptocurrencies are still completely useless for it despite it being the number one use case that is shouted from the crypto rooftops.

So you're left with: "It made a ton of money for rich and a few lucky middle class people" and "some quasi dictator implemented it as an additional currency without a mandate".

Moving the goalposts to something vague and further in the future wont help you convince anyone about usefulness

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