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40 sats \ 2 replies \ @phygit 16 May 2023 \ parent \ on: What if we're wrong? bitcoin

The argument is classic, tiring... and wrong.

  1. "The Internet as we know it started in 1973". Absolutely not. The Internet we know started with the Web, the first websites and browsers, in 1994–1995. And 5-6 later there were 500M users.
  2. Bitcoin, like any digital innovation, naturally benefited form the existence of the Internet. Launching Bitcoin in the 1980s would have been a challenge, but Bitcoin really started (and got media attention) in the 2010s, with already billions of Internet users, smartphones, blogs, social media etc.

So yes, 200M Bitcoin users (which is already optimistic) in 15 years, in a context of a fully digital era where half the planet live their lives through digital tools and networks, is a very bad result.

The real question is: considering how many people are digital-savvy and aware of the existence of Bitcoin, why so few are actually using it?

If we imagine that only 1B people know about Bitcoin today, it means that 80% of them *have decided" not to use it. We should ask ourselves why.

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64 sats \ 0 replies \ @randy 17 May 2023

He’s not wrong, you’re just missing the point. He didn’t say the web, he said the internet. And the internet as “we” tech people know it as the beginning of the UDP, TCP/IP network.

Bitcoin to “we” Bitcoiners know it as a system where transactions are committed onto the base blockchain but who knows what the “web moment” looks like for Bitcoin. One thing is for sure, we can’t scale to global adoption without L2s in place and I’m sure the “web” moment will be some mix between a series of catastrophic financial event and a killer app (running on an L2 under the hood) ready to onboard the next billion users

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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @javier123454321 20 May 2023

Another variable that undermines the "Internet did to telecoms what Bitcoin is doing to money" argument is that telecoms were about a century old industry, while money is a civilizationial level technology. Disruption in telecoms naturally should happen much faster than a disruption in the base layer of value transfer.

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