RE: https://mastodon.social/@indivisibleteam/116881262997934936
It’s just wild to me how quickly and completely we’ve gone from “everything in the future will be blockchain” to blockchain being •completely• absent from the public eye except as (1) a Trump grift and (2) money launderers buying politicians.
Not wild to me that this happened. Just wild how swift and decisive it was.
I would pay to see a historical museum exhibit called “Absolute Bullshit Time Magazine Put on Their Cover”
Jul 7, 2026, 11:33 PMEvery so often, I'll hear a story about .gifs of simians. But for the most part, I don't hear anything about NFTs these days. A flash in the pan, a true Dutch tulip in the historical sense.
It would be easier to dismiss these as regular fads if half the financial sectors hadn't been taken in by them...
to paraphrase ferris bueller:
"Tech moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you might be lucky and miss it."
ooh! a double feature along with "X world's fair: this is the future" exhibits. :)
@inthehands Lies and fabrications told by National Review
@inthehands Re: Time Covers
Adolf Hitler | Apr. 13, 1936
https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19360413,00.html
They have a search for them?
https://content.time.com/time/coversearch/0,16871,,00.html
Jul 7, 2026, 11:38 PM@inthehands It's weird how frothy it got. Blockchain is a really incredible feat of computer science built on decades of mathematical research, but it's... a distributed database. And a wildly inefficient one.
Like imagine investors going nuts over an algorithm, or a bunch of mathematical functions that predict the next wor...... oh
@womp @inthehands Back in the 1970s I worked on secure network research. We thought we had invented block-chained cryptography (we were never allowed to publish because of customer constraints.) However, we learned that certain three letter government agencies may have had a prior claim of invention.
(Below is a photo of one of our blackboards, made on Dec 31, 1974. It is a bit hard to make out, but we were trying to insert a security layer between the then rather experimental IP and TCP protocols.)
(One of our group members went on to invent - or so he thought - public key cryptography.)
@inthehands Not sure it's fair to say blockchain doesn't have relevance. The headlines have moved on but the tech still exists and is being used by major financial companies for various decentralized products.