This is maybe a tangent, but: how long before we're allowed to stop calling cryptocurrencies a new technology, and admit that actual usage is not being blocked on early development? Bitcoin itself is 14 years old; if it were a web framework, it would have been "obsoleted" half a dozen times over by now.
New is pretty context dependent. Money is literally older than history. That sets up a lot of context by itself, and further the fact that it's so important means people, governments and institutions are pretty conservative (in the slow to adopt change sense) about it. Banks have only recently reached infrastructure status in that context - and only in well developed nations. Credit cards are still new in that context (and it shows). The 14 years of bitcoin is basically embryonic in terms of "money tech".
Standardized weights of specie are older than history; you can find different perspectives on how much they count as "money".
But history begins at a time when the role of money in society is still very much up for debate; Hammurabi's code (~1000 years after the beginning of history, give or take) includes a provision specifying that, if you run a bar, you can't require customers to pay in silver but must also accept grain.
Grain as currency continues across the world for a few thousand years after that, but grain is a terrible currency because it spoils very quickly. (Counting things like "rats got into the grain" as a form of spoilage.)
This is a reasonable point, but it demands that we ignore the parabolic trend in every other aspect of human development. We've gone from horse-drawn carriages to moon landings and instantaneous global communication in the last 125 years; why does Bitcoin get over 10% of that time to do what I can already do with the piece of plastic in my wallet?
Depending how you define personal credit, its been around ~100 years (or more!), with the card format being adopted in the 60s. It's only been the last 15 years or so that not carrying cash has become a reasonable approach to day-to-day life.
So for bitcoin to become as big as it has as a brand new technology in only 14 years seems accelerated.
This is analysis complicated a bit by the fact that bitcoin is not a top-down tech like credit, there's no centralized group deciding who gets to use it. On the other side of that though - the tech infrastructure build-out that made credit cards ubiquitous also benefits and accelerates the potential adoption of bitcoin.
It's parabolic with respect to middlemen, but none of the other properties I care about. That isn't to say there are no advancements (I think privacy-preserving finance is an important frontier), but they don't stack up well, to say the least.
What you're saying clearly makes sense but Bitcoin isn't accepted almost anywhere which is what "new" means. Porn would be an early adopter for potentially mass consumption. It would be new to me certainly as I've never purchased a single thing with Bitcoin and that's almost certainly true for most people.
I don't know. I passed a bitcoin ATM machine (don't ask me what that actually means, please) on the street yesterday. Friends and family members, including (especially?) non-technical ones, have asked me about Bitcoin and how to invest in it. One of my friends recently bought a car with Ethereum.
"New" means "new," it doesn't mean "not widely adopted yet." We don't widely adopt things that fail or have unacceptable side effects; that doesn't make them new again.
I don't buy that. The Euro was conceived in 1992 and constituted a radical shift in international monetary policy; it wasn't fully rolled out until 2002.
That's 10 years compared to Bitcoin's 14, with arguably far more in concrete financial activity (and quality of life) to show for it.
Sure but again let's be a little more nuanced. When the Euro came out, trillions in wealth were automatically converted to it. Pretty apples to oranges comparison. If all USD was converted to BTC, BTC would become useful everywhere as fast as people could change the POS systems. Not a fair comparison at all.
> When the Euro came out, trillions in wealth were automatically converted to it.
This is true, but also misleading: the physical Euro switch took place over months, and involved a coordinated public campaign to encourage millions of Europeans to exchange their physical bills. Digitalization helped with banking, but a significant human and policy effort occurred in parallel.
And there's another problem: it's really not clear what it would mean for "all USD to be converted to BTC." BTC has already been issued, and will continue to be algorithmically issued. The Euro switch could not be economically triaged per se, because it was an in-kind transition. No such transition is possible for cryptocurrencies, unless we allow a central authority into the mix.
The euro is not a new type of currency tech. Its just a new painting on the same type of currency that has existed for hundreds of years (that is it's a new brand of banknote).
Not to put too fine a point on it, but my guess is there is probably little overlap in the Venn diagram of people paying for porn subscriptions and people capable of managing a crypto wallet.
The TL;DR is that blockchain scaling is a very difficult problem. There are scaling layers like ZKSync that are only possible because of cryptographic primitives that literally didn't exist in a usable form 14 years ago.
And I somewhat disagree with your premise – cryptocurrencies are actually used in the real world today. Most of the usage is to get around regulation, like when you want to send remittances or buy drugs, or bet on betting markets. But on the whole I do agree, it's disappointing that the technology is still so immature.
At this point, the fact that cryptocurrencies haven't successfully captured this markets tell us that they never will.
14 years ago the argument was "you just wait!"
Today, everyone in the US knows what "crypto" is, far more than know what "cryptography" is based on my casual conversations. The fact that porn hasn't moved to entirely crypto means that crypto has not survived the test of time.
There are plenty of other examples as well, the fact that Russian oligarchs (or even just regular old wealthy Russians) aren't creating massive demand for crypto to thwart sanctions is another example that crypto will never become an alternate, super-legal, currency.
It's honestly a shame that it doesn't work because, during the first wave of crypto hype, I rather liked the libertarian visions of an unregulated underground economy. I thought crypto enthusiasts were wrong then, but I at least hoped they were right.
