fiatjaf on Nostr: I don't know how to elaborate more than what I already said: someone invents some new ...

I don't know how to elaborate more than what I already said: someone invents some new thing that is sold as having the potential to "build a new internet". And the thing actually works, wow! Everybody is excited, people start to put time into it, use it in their lives, tell others, convince businesses to accept payments using that because it is instant and free, you name it.

Only a small number of people realize what was already obvious from the start: that despite working pretty well when the number of users is low, that thing can never replace the incumbent system, because for that it would have to support billions of users, and this new invention would start breaking horribly if a certain number of users (much less than a billion) arrived. Perhaps it would still work with a billion users, but serious compromises would have to be done: the system would have to centralize drastically and become almost the same thing as the incumbent it replaced.

The most likely outcome is that the new technology never grows beyond a million users, so the obvious issues never materialize. The second most likely outcome is that the thing grows and slowly turns into the worst version of itself and most people don't realize.

Maybe the failure to grow in most cases is influenced by the fact that many people who could have adhered to the cause in the beginning don't do it because they see the obvious flaws, but it's hard to imagine this being the case.