> What's the "AOL of BitCoin" - the "way-in" for a hundred million Americans? What's the "ICQ of BitCoin",

The AOL is coinbase (a YC company!!), for sending money to people that may be disliked, saving, etc.

There's no ICQ because it's not instant messaging - just like there was no fax features for AOL in 1995.

> One difference of the net in 1995 is that I wanted more access to the net in 1995 and couldn't have it for age reasons

Now you're really starting to see it: even if you're under 18, you can create and deploy smart contract, and use your brain to learn more and become big in finance. Or just have fun -- it doesn't matter! No barrier of entry!

I wish I had had that opportunity as a teen!! The net was nice, but it was hard to get real money. I didn't disclose my age so I could get my first pay cheques.

> What about it is anything like the net of 1995? (Except your intent to make me dream big about the future growth and associated riches).

Now you're seing it wrong again. It's not about riches.

It's a brand new domain, full of opportunities to "do things" for a lot of people - especially those not in North America / Europe / the few lucky Asian countries - which is about, the majority of humanity!

I'm sorry to say, you won't get rich. I see only about 50x to 100x left for the near future (the next 10 years), with the possibility of huge swings. It's not much by historic standard -- you and me missed the most of it, that was before 2010.

Still, there's some left, and you should totally put 500 to 1k in coinbase then move it to your offline wallet, but no more - nothing that you can't afford to lose due to unforeseeable regulatory hurdles, hard drive failures etc. It may get you a very nice car, but nothing more unfortunately. Too little too late.

Actually, this is close to the predominant advice that as on lesswrong in the early 2010s, by "moldbug": use about $10 to buy 10 bitcoins, as the odds of success are greater than 1/10000.

Those who followed the advice got >100k - but only 3% did. It's such an obvious failure of LW they did a few postmortems, to try to understand how they could get it so wrong: have the right people tell them exactly what to do, properly see what needed to be done was justified, correctly understand and forecast, yet fail to take advantage of the unique opportunity with all the stars aligned.

It's a very nice read: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MajyZJrsf8fAywWgY/a-lesswron...

> If you're a company and you accept bitcoin, it makes life harder for you, for approximately no customers, and the payment you get might lose half its value by next month or be stolen in ways you don't understand with no oversight or regulation and law enforcement with little experience of what to do next. If you're a normal person, it's a less convenient way to pay for things. Why should you give a damn?

Let's rephrase that for 1995:

> If you're a company and you open an online store, it makes life harder for you, for approximately no customers, and the payment you get might be stolen in ways you don't understand with no oversight or regulation and law enforcement with little experience of what to do next. If you're a normal person, it's a less convenient way to pay for things. Why should you give a damn?

I only change bitcoin to "an online store", and removed the part about variance as it's different and doesn't need to apply - because you can edge for that buying options, or let your intermediary handle it for you. For example, you can decide to automatically convert to a stablecoin or fiat at the very minute the payment is received!! (or keep a 10% exposure, or whatever)

Now do you see how this is luddism?

> The easy counter is "no wireless, less space than a Nomad, lame" and I must be blind to its benefits

Exactly, it's being fossilized in our ways.

You want another example? I still see people decrying systemd - they must not have done a lot of system administrations, for it is a GREAT addition ... if you are open to learning and changing your ways!

Basically, it's constraint propagations (like Makefiles) + unification of a bunch of disparate things. I love lightweight distributions, and a linux+musl+systemd+busybox I could see replacing a lot of container related technologies!

Maybe it's the asperger/autism spectrum that's making people prefer things they know, maybe it's age making people decry what didn't exist in the 20s as the work of the devil, but for me it's shocking to read such things on HN!

> Smart Contracts better be really good to make up the rest.

Well, if you think they aren't and want to improve them, it's up to you. It's fun to create things that benefit a lot of people - like free software early on. Have you forgotten the hacker spirit?

There're lots of crooks and poseurs - just like free software in the early 2000s actually (do you remember the times around the VA linux IPO?), but that's an unfortunate fact of life.

> What else did you know about in 2008, not get involved in, which turned out to be crud?

I DIDN'T KNOW and that's exactly the problem!

Instead, I relied on the wisdom of the HN crowd, which denounced bitcoin as a dangerous scam, and trusted them.

I didn't take the time to investigate the claim, or I would have realized the only thing it'd do is to run a daemon for a while, which would show me how it works (and teach me things about P2P) - it was about as dangerous as Seti-at-home or Fold-at-home.

It was a rude awakening: that's when I realized a large majority of the self proclaimed geeks you find on HN are hardly better than a random person you meet in a street when asked for advice outside their domain -- actually, a lot worse, due to Dunning-Krugger effect.

It did cost me, but that's life. I'm just sad this misplaced confidence keep making victims among bright people.