Hacker News Reader

Because it’s happening slowly and people aren’t paying attention.

If a decade and a half with many billions invested is getting such slow adoption, why do we think that’ll change?

You have oddly fast timelines for adoption. These things take time.

None of the competitors needed anything like decades. Companies like PayPal, Venmo, Square, etc. had far more usage with a year or two of launch, and nothing like the high percentage of companies who started using them and removed the option because the fraud / benefit ratio was dismal.

The iPhone came out the year before crypto.

One of them literally changed the entire world.

The other caused totally unnecessary climate change and a bunch of people lost all their money.

So, I’ll ask the question that I seem to have to ask in every thread. It’s been 15 years. How long do we have to wait? 30? 50? 100?

I got involved with bitcoin in 2010. I never expected it to take off (price-wise) so soon. I thought maybe 2050, and I still think that's a reasonable guess. Overturning the global financial system from the bottom-up takes time.

ARPANet started in 1969. The internet as we know it today didn't take off until the late 90's, and wasn't a profitable world-changing sector until the 00's.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com