Author Topic: Interesting conversation going on with Mike Hearn right now.  (Read 957 times)

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Offline Method-X

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http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2jhzxq/linus_regrets_how_insults_damaged_the_linux/clbz87r

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By the time I joined the Gmail team, it was already very large. It controlled growth in the early days by using invites. But I don't think Gmail and Bitcoin are comparable growth-wise, although I wish they were:
  • Gmail was perfectly compatible with existing email and everyone understood what email was. It was a drop in replacement for existing products. Bitcoin is not: I can't spend bitcoins at my local supermarket.
  • Gmail was a massive leap over the competition in every way. It had lots of upsides and no downsides (except the need to tell people your new email address). Bitcoin's value proposition is more complicated; it has advantages, but also disadvantages to balance, like volatility.
  • Gmail required only that you sign up for it, which was free and took almost no time. Bitcoin requires that you learn new skills and then spend money to acquire some.
  • Gmail had no legal or regulatory uncertainty around it.
  • Gmail entered an entirely stagnant market in which innovation was non existent. This is a good description of the US banking market but doesn't fit other markets quite as well, e.g. banking is more competitive and there's more technical upgrades taking place in Europe, in Africa there's a lot of mobile money etc.
Despite this perfect "slam dunk" situation, it still took a little under a decade for Gmail to surpass Hotmail/Yahoo and become the biggest email provider in the world.

So to imagine that Bitcoin would become as large as VISA or MasterCard faster than Gmail surpassed Hotmail just seems unbelievably optimistic to me. The only way that can happen traffic-wise is if it's used in fundamentally different ways. SatoshiDice was an example of that, but a small one. If there are others on the horizon we aren't hearing about them right now.

Anyway, the technical scaling issues involved in Gmail vs Bitcoin are entirely different. There isn't much we can learn from it.