That said, do you remember the first search engine? I don't. I'm sure I could look it up, but it's irrelevant.
There will be demand for something like a cryptocurrency. I doubt it will be Bitcoin. Once people realize that it was set up to transfer wealth to early adopters, they're going to hate it and Bitcoin will have a real brand-image problem. It might overcome that; who knows? I'm just saying that it's too speculative to take it seriously as a currency.
It's not just the first, but the biggest so far. A more fair comparison would be the concepts of ebay, credit score, etc that benefit from massive network effects and then become the defacto standard.
People can get over the idea of wealth transfer to early adopters if they find some unique benefits that they can't get with other currencies. That said, you're right. It's still in the early nascent stages and could just as easily be another betamax.
Actually, I think Bitcoin and Magic: the Gathering tell us something. Talent generates value, and sometimes that value is realized in an asset that has currency-like properties.
Why's a dollar valuable? It's debt from a powerful nation state.
Why is the Black Lotus valuable? Richard Garfield deployed his talents to making a game that people really wanted to play, and the BL is a scarce, in-game resource.
Why is BTC valuable? Someone deployed computational talent to make a cryptocurrency work. It's non-trivial work, and I'd probably take a BitCoin course on Coursera to really get into the guts of how the problem is solved.
I don't like BTC. I don't like the enforced deflation that, as we've noted, give the profits away to the ones who get in early, and create what has the potential to be an enormous asset bubble. (No one can predict such things; it could go to $1000 or $10,000 before it finally crashes, but I'm pretty damn sure its long-term destination is zero.)
I saw this with Magic and it sucked. That time, though, it wasn't intentional. They didn't take "the power 9" out of print to payoff early adopters on the secondary market; they did it to balance the game. No one expected, at that time, that these cards would eventually be worth over $1000 each. (Now I feel like an idiot; when I got into Magic, Moxen were out of print but only $100-125. Unaffordable for a teenager; a computer science textbook, at 29.)
So there are already processes that turn talent into a currency, but those are one-shot. It'd be more interesting to see a continuous, reliable proof-of-work system to turn talent into currency that isn't beholden to some corporation.
However, this is complicated by the fact that talent is intermittent. Proof-of-work systems work for commodity work (concave) but talent shines on the convex. Convexity is the defining economic problem of the 21st century, and for more than you'd ever want to read on this topic, start here:
That said, do you remember the first search engine? I don't. I'm sure I could look it up, but it's irrelevant.
There will be demand for something like a cryptocurrency. I doubt it will be Bitcoin. Once people realize that it was set up to transfer wealth to early adopters, they're going to hate it and Bitcoin will have a real brand-image problem. It might overcome that; who knows? I'm just saying that it's too speculative to take it seriously as a currency.