That is, Cowen, Andreessen, and Horowitz, in a 40-minute podcast. I chose to annotate it. Annotating is, like writing a book review, a way for me to absorb the material. Some excerpts from my essay:
1. As far as I can tell, blockchain can only help to prevent one type of cheating: digital forgery. If blockchain is going to have a killer app, then it has to enable a transaction to take place where the only impediment to undertaking such a transaction currently is the threat of digital forgery.
I would add that digital money faces the threat of digital forgery. But digital money also faces other impediments. ICYMI, my whole point is that other impediments to trust are, in the grand scheme of things, much more important.
2. New listening technology strikes me as incremental, not revolutionary. Portable radios are a very old technology. I listened to the Beatles sing “When I’m 64” on a transistor radio when I was 13. Now I’m 64.
3. Could AR and VR become a big part of everyone’s life? In my opinion, yes. Have the breakthroughs necessary for that to happen occurred or are they on the verge of occurring? In my opinion, no.
I would add that I do not know what the key breakthroughs will be. In fact, we will only have a better idea in hindsight. Who knew ahead of time that the breakthroughs needed to make mobile Internet access a winning technology had taken place by 2007 but not earlier?
4. I assume that in Israel and China, security issues provide an arena for cultural mixing between government and technology. Presumably, there is also some cultural mixing between Silicon Valley and part of the American military and homeland security apparatus.
Regarding Crypto:
There are a number of business models today that require clearing houses/brokers/middlemen to operate, many of them are roughly in the arena of selling/trading other people’s stuff. Options, stocks, banks, hotel rooms, airline seats.
The middlemen create a neutral arbiter of trust so that these transactions can occur and it is a very lucrative business.
If crypto can be scaled to handle the number of transactions required it has the potential to eliminate these middlemen by establishing immutable trust between these organizations.
From the annotations: Other things equal, stability appeals to someone high up in government.
That’s not just self-interest – government includes a lot of functions where failure is very, very bad. If Facebook goes down, life goes on. If 911 goes down, people die. If NORAD got hacked by some 14-year old Ukrainian goth? Game over, it’s the cockroaches’ turn. Under the circumstances, risk aversion makes sense.
Why did AOL fade so fast? — closed garden, content inside wasn’t found when searched (by Alta Vista, Yahoo, or Ask Jeeves, even before Google beta, but also after). Blogs and “info wants to be free”, tho storage had to be paid for, somehow.
Not enough reason to stay in the “garden”; not fully free? (I was free surfing and free blogging, only; there was something I didn’t like about AOL).
Plus they bought Time Warner … expanding too fast, pushing content before the market / other infrastructure, like bandwidth, was ready. (Like the Apple Newton personal assistant, too early; almost the case with the Mac, was the case with the Lisa, 1984).
Blockchain will be big for high cost item retail, and for crooks and privacy “nuts” (? anti-IRS folk), plus lots of early speculators. Bigger than you think; less than they think.
Listening tech? Where is the speech to text auto-writer for such podcasts, so I can read, & later search, the text (in less than half the time with better retention)?
There’s a big niche for better “free” speech to text of podcasts — advertiser supported.
VR 2.0 is already here: TV was 1.0, videogames is 2.0. There’s a growing chorus of folk calling for the economic breakthru that lets VR loose to dominate lives — UBI.
Universal Basic Income, so half the men, or more, can play games all day, everyday, and have “decent” lives. PlayStationXBox is like VR 2.5 or so. It gets better, and maybe with more movement a bit less obesity. VR is a big reason I now support Job Guarantee over UBI (soul destroying thru game seduction).
That so many tech folk supported HR Clinton, a politician clearly willing to use the FBI, the DOJ, the IRS, all against political opponents, should be a huge wake-up call for anybody who loves freedom. What Google is helping the Chinese do with “re-education” camps, and almost constant public surveillance, is truly frightening.
Big Data is watching you, and corrupted Deep State bureaucrats haven’t yet fully consolidated all the power, but are working on it. The next Dem president is likely to be tech using monster. Dem Deep Staters, not laws, are stopping Trump or any Reps from being such monsters now.
How about that Genghis Khan model of management — starting with 30,000 skulls.
“Horowitz sees blockchain as a general-purpose technology for providing trust.”
That seems a strange way for him to put it. Instead, it would be better to say that blockchain technology provides not ‘trust’ (or really just a form of information assurance) but an alternative to trust: that it permits certain interactions to happen in the absence of trust, to include institutional support or intermediation, and the typical indicators of and incentives for trustworthiness.
The problem is not establishing trust, but wanting a way to do things without an “intricate interlocking arrangement of institutions”, especially when parties don’t want those institutions to know their business, use their market power to charge high fees, or be able to block or interfere with those interactions in undesirable ways.
“Escaping Control by Intermediaries by Making Them Unnecessary” is a very important problem to solve. Unfortunately it’s one that mostly criminals want solved.
Blockchains are really only good for making sure that records are complete and unchangeable*. The part of the process that makes sure the records correspond to some physical or social reality (a seller ships you what you paid for, your blockchain property deed is recognized by authorities, etc.) isn’t provided by blockchain technology, but it’s usually the most important part.
* Assuming that everyone sets up their internet security properly, which historically has been a very poor assumption.