I keep asking this about Bitcoin, et al. For 6 years I've been getting, "Oh, it's just about to take off! You'll see soon!"
The Internet was definitely delivering value daily by 1990. It wasn't just a technological curiosity. Email, Usenet, mailing lists, file transfer, remote computing: all providing the sort of benefits that let researchers and academics justify paying to connect up.
I think cryptocurrencies and blockchains are technologically neat, and I appreciate them on that level. But neat technology doesn't always end up being useful.
Here you are basically reiterating the metaphor "the blockchain is like the Internet was back in the day". Since that's what I was responding to, I already am familiar with the metaphor. Repeating it doesn't help me.
What I'm saying is that for the metaphor to be useful in terms of evaluating the commercial/societal impact of a technology, I want to see evidence of utility that is similar to what we could see for the early Internet.
So who do you believe the early vanguard is? Who is actually getting value? Who are the people previously isolated from global finance that are now making daily or at least weekly transactions?
I see you're already aware of M-Pesa, which is only a couple of years older than Bitcoin. But M-Pesa has, per CNN, "30 million users in 10 countries and a range of services including international transfers, loans, and health provision. The system processed around 6 billion transactions in 2016 at a peak rate of 529 per second." Bitcoin's numbers are orders of magnitude smaller, and it's my impression that it would be much smaller still if we subtracted the speculative transactions to match what people use M-Pesa for.
Yes, the Internet was delivering daily value in 1990, but only to a very, very small group of users. I was in grad school then, but the Internet was not a factor in my environment. Networking was carrying floppies from here to there.
Same thing with cryptocurrencies. It's delivering value to a small group of users, though that group is much more than the small group served by the Internet in 1990. Mining and trading in cryptocurrencies have millions for some, so it's serving them well.
The one group I have to admit is getting value from Bitcoin is criminals. E.g., it's the technology of choice for ransomware. But that just doesn't strike me as a use case that will help Bitcoin cross the chasm.
It's certainly possible that Bitcoin is like the Internet was in 1975. But at that point, they hadn't even invented TCP/IP, which came in '82. At that point, ARPANET was just one of many approaches to networking, including BITNET, Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet. Not to mention the circuit-switched networks that were probably dominant in revenue terms. It seems totally plausible to me that Bitcoin and/or blockchains could end up as a similar "people used it for a little while but it's hard to remember why" thing.
Or, worse, it could end up like the OSI protocol stack: a collection of exciting ideas that nobody ever really got working to deliver much value in the real world.
Well you could say the same about Bitcoin as it's current price comes from people willing to buy Bitcoin using their USDs.
If you're buying bitcoin because of some utility it offers you beyond speculation, the price doesn't really matter. You just exchange one monetary denomination for another and do whatever you plan to do with it.
When you buy something like an internet connection or any other good or service you perform a cost benefit analysis. For example, if internet connections were 100x their current price, many fewer people would have one.(And interestingly for a network like the internet, the higher the cost to access, the less users, and thus less useful because of the network effect.)
They created an artificial gold rush so they could sell shovels.
