We always compare bitcoin with the early personal computer, or the early internet, or the early automobile or electricity. We say how there were many people who were against these inventions, but they ended up changing the world. These were the success stories.


How many such potentially world-changing technology did not make it past that stage? Is the success rate really 100% or close to it? On one hand, that seems to be possible, given the world-changing nature of it. But if a potentially world-changing technology didn't get past a certain stage, most of us would have never heard of it anyway, so we don't know that it failed.

It's kind of like how we only hear of the successful entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, but in reality many more fail.

This question brings two discussions.

1. If the success rate of world-changing technology is actually not that high, can we really be confident that bitcoin will pull through? Of course we're under the assumption here that bitcoin really is a world-changing technology.

2. Are we, as humans, potentially hundreds of years behind where we could've been, had all the potentially world-changing technology became mainstream? Maybe we'd be all living lives we can only dream of now. Think of how many great opportunities you missed in your life, and how that would've changed your life. Perhaps those missed opportunities are completely insignificant compared to the missed opportunities of man-kind. And it's not like how we don't yet have the technology to create a perfect AI, or cure aging. Rather these are opportunities that could've happened. Someone really developed it, but we, as humans, simply failed to see the benefits and threw it away.