A lot of people talk about how blockchain and cryptocurrencies are going to change the world. These people never forget to mention how internet was treated i the 90s. Most people were skeptical about the internet. It was the millennial generation that got into internet without being skeptics about it. But was it the internet that changed the world? From what I remember about my childhood, the internet was pretty terrible. I mean have you guys ever suffered through a dial up connection loading a page with a whole bunch of pictures? Have you ever faced buffering while streaming a low quality video? From what I remember there was barely a thing called streaming to begin with. You had to download the files and there was no such thing as opening a new tab. You had to open a new window on Internet Explorer and the revolutionary technology that allowed the mobile phones (this was lang before they got "smart") to access the internet was called GPRS.
[General - Packet - Radio - Service] Have you ever heard of that? It was awful. It reminds me of Bitcoin.
Before all that, let's visit an old joke. This was published by a very respect news source and written by an American astronomer with a PhD. The magnificent "joke" was published on Newsweek and this well educated intellectual buffoon was named Clifford Stoll. Actually it was Clifford Paul "Cliff" Stoll. He even expanded the whole thing into a book titled Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. It was written to be a well thought out intellectual masterpiece that knew better than the rest of the hot headed revolutionary kids. But the whole work serves as some ironical joke for most people to cringe on.
After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.Baloney.
He actually said this. i'm sure some of you have even read the whole infamous post. But today I want you guys to do something beyond laughing at this intellectual academic dinosaur. I just need you to close your eyes and travel tot he times you were using dial up internet or this really cool tech GPRS which allowed you to read web pages on your phone! While traveling!!
Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them–one’s a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn’t work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, “Too many connections, try again later.”
These were actually real problems. Wikipedia was only found in 2001. The networks could barley handle any load. I mean is it surprising that bankers look down o BTC. The old relic can't even manage 7 Tx per second. I respect Mr. Robot TV series. But it lost a decent chunk of respect when it assumed BTC being the primary medium of exchange in China after a global financial turmoil. The truth is that the worst thing that could happen to BTC is mass adoption. We saw what happened during the last peak where BTC was getting some real eyeballs. Do you think Bitcoin would really amount to anything going forward like this?
Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.
Internet was expensive those days and why even bother voting when there is no reward to gain or a stake on something. When it comes to STEEM, most active accounts have made a witness vote and if you look at a Masternode based governance coin like Dash or an imitator like PIVX, you'll see that there is some real interest in voting. But interned had to have another invention called "Blockchain" on top of it to make it a good place for governance.
Point and click:Then there are those pushing computers into schools. We’re told that multimedia will make schoolwork easy and fun. Students will happily learn from animated characters while taught by expertly tailored software.Who needs teachers when you’ve got computer-aided education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult to use in classrooms and require extensive teacher training.
Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
It turns out that the internet can do the sales part better than the live version. I mean how long does a person stay in a shop Vs how long does a person stay on the internet? We also have this Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) which make banks look like mere closets.
All of this massive gap between projections from 1995 and present day has a missing ingredient. It's not mass adoption and it is not even ease of use (although it contributed). If you can try to put yourself in the shoes of a person form 1995 and look at the world, what is the difference.
What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing?
Finally the author gets one part right. Real sex > cybersex. But apart from that I can say that lack of human contact has also become a feature. Nobody can arrest you on the net. Some people could get seizures watching certain things things. But that's a limited reach for an aggressor.
The disparity between the reality and the assumptions can be explained with a seemingly paradoxical statement. I could say that the internet didn't change people's lives. If you get out of your reality bubble/ echo chamber constructed by algorithms that are used to keep you engaged to view ads that are designed to sell stuff, you'll find many revolutionary technologies that has been around for a while.
The video was uploaded more than 4 years ago. It's a collection of some truly amazing things and many of them can change the course of human history as we'd project it today. In fact this whole article was built to get you to this point. Will any of these tech really change the world? Will blockchain really change the world? Was the internet of 1995 at a position that could change the world? Think about that.
The internet didn't change the world; 3G and Broadband did. 4G and fiber optics enhanced and moved things forward. Something that was kickstarted y the internet ended up changing the course of human history. In the same way Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin or anything that resemble Bitcoin will NEVER change the world. It would be something else; something better.
In the coming years Bitcoin would become less and less revered and by 2030 it'd be something to be looked down on as if it is some annoyance. Using Bitcoin would be a misfortune like having to get your water from a well with the help of a bucket. This will be around 2030. This statement is going to be stored on the blockchain and nobody is going to delete it. My statement would get the recpetion that Clifford Paul "Cliff" Stoll is getting these days. But I will live to see the day where the precous tech of certain maximalists (BTC, ETH etc) is going to be a nuisance that is in the way of progress. If you are young, your children will feel sorry for you for having to use Bitcoin and they will not even be old enough to drive.