Reading all the hot takes on crypto/web3 going “but what use case does it solve?” and mostly thinking to myself that these folk have such confidence in their opinions.
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The nice thing about reading history is that it repeatedly (and I mean REPEATEDLY) disabuses you of the notion that tech needs a clear use case in its infancy.
I put myself in the shoes of mistaken commentators and mostly think “hmm, yeah, that take makes sense.”
It’s humbling.
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Inside Intuit. There’s no ebook version so I had to buy a second hand hardback. It’s not a very good book and I don’t recommend it.
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I don’t know enough about web3 to have a view either way but I’m not convinced by this comparison since at this point computers were already providing a lot of value to specific (even if niche at this point) roles and had been for years (decades?)
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Please remember that the survivorship bias is strong when reading a book about Intuit.
Lacking a direct use does *not* make a technology *more likely* to survive.
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The point isn't that such cases do not exist. There is tech that succeeded because it had a clear use case, as well as tech that succeeded even though it had no clear use case. The point is that 'having a use case' is not a useful/sufficient criterion for tech success.
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Not to miss the forest for the trees, but: e.g. statista.com/statistics/214 in % of US households with PCs goes from 8% in 1984 to 36% in 1997 to a booming 51% in 2000 (dotcom bubble).
— I believe use of smartphone or social media was faster than this, too.
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