François CholletVerified account

1994: “the internet means there’ll be no more governments!” 2018: “blockchain means there’ll be no more governments!” Both nonsense, yes. But the internet still turned out to be pretty important, and it was partly because of the things that prompted people to talk like that.

I think the future impact of truly game-changing technologies (e.g. the smartphone) was immediately clear to geeks from the beginning. How is that the case for the blockchain? I've heard 100s of pitches about it and I still have no idea how it is supposed to matter

Obviously. My point is that the delusional character of some descriptions of it have a little bit of signal deep inside

Not sure that's true. Game-changing tech will generally get hyped up in delusional ways (though not always), but inversely many things that get hyped to the moon don't actually end up being important...

The common thread is radical and powerful decentralization. You can see that it is here but not see where it will be applied.

Wasn't radical decentralization also a key pitch for IoT in the late 2000s/early 2010s?

One more thing about this parallel -- many argue the importance of the blockchain by comparing it to the Internet (the "next Internet"). But that was the exact same comparison used for IoT -- it's right in the name

This argument by analogy is unconvincing because comparing distributed ledger technology to IoT is like comparing TCP/IP to the iPhone. Do you have a first principles argument to root the discussion? :)