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A friendly reminder that it has historically taken ~20 years for inventions to diffuse into mass-market innovations.
Ethereum’s invention of programmable money and smart contracts is barely ten years old. The roadmap is finally starting to click into place, and Pectra(s) next year will be a leap forward with AA, Verkle trees, based rollups, etc.
The next ten years will see gradual architecture ossification and rapid adoption along the S-curve.
Drivers for that adoption will include real-world asset tokenization, an explosion in stablecoin usage for payments and remittance, TradFi using DeFi rails for loans and investments, and a trustless marketplace of autonomous agents capable of transacting through their own on-chain identity.
Forget about today’s shitcoins, ETHBTC ratio, Gary Gensler, and all that transient noise. Zoom out and the future is both bright and obvious.
Ten years from now, we will be writing “in retrospect, it was inevitable”.
You’re not bullish enough about Ethereum, anon 17 replies
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RCA “invented” the color TV in 1953 (following a 1940 parent), the first color broadcast was performed in 1965, and color TV sales only exceeded B&W in 1972: ~20 years
Magnetic tape recording for video was invented in the 1950s but saw adoption from 1976 onward in the mass market: ~20 years
TCP/IP was standardized in 1978 after ten years of ARPANET development. Mass adoption happened from 1995 onward: ~20 years
First commercial cell phone prototype was in 1973, 1G networks opened in 1983 in the US, but GSM norm adoption picked up from 1991 onward: ~20 years
The 20-year cycle is actually pretty robust - see the diffusion of innovations framework (Rogers, Christensen, etc).
In blockchains, databases existed since the 1960s, public-key cryptography since the 1970s, and P2P tech since the late 1990s. But 2014 was when the first smart contract platform we know as Ethereum was released. We’re barely ten years in and still missing a few blocks for mass adoption incl. AA, UX, TPS, etc
!remindme 10 years 1 reply
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No, precisely, the tech predates the invention, which predates the innovation, by longer than 20 years. The diffusion “clock” starts at the time of the invention, not of the tech. I was mentioning the underlying tech precisely to preempt any argument that it takes longer than 20 years (yours was that it took less).
So I’m not counting from ARPANET; I’m counting from TCP/IP which is what we still use today. I’m also counting from 1G since GSM is what got adopted, not radio technology from the 19th century. Color TV from the first model, not from the 1940 patent. Etc.
Smart contracts weren’t a thing until 2014 despite the individual underlying techs being more ancient (databases, PK crypto, P2P, and programming languages from which Solidity was inspired).
The 20-year diffusion cycle has pretty robust empirical evidence attached to it (I used to work as a product innovation consultant, that’s how I learned about it) 1 reply
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