The problem with thinking the world will never change and/or that your piece of the $$ pie is forever protected by the government:
9 Life-Changing Inventions the Experts Said Would Never Work1. The Electric Lightbulb"Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure."
Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology, on Edison’s light bulb, 1880.
2. The A/C"Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever."
Thomas Edison, 1889.
3. The Personal Computer"We have reached the limits of what is possible with computers."
John Von Neumann, 1949
4. The Microchip"But what… is it good for?"
An engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, commenting on the microchip in 1968.
5. Data Transmission"Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition."
Dennis Gabor, Hungarian-British physicist, 1962.
6. Online Shopping"Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop – because women like to get out of the house, like to handle merchandise, like to be able to change their minds."
TIME, 1966.
7. The Automobile"The ordinary “horseless carriage” is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle."
Literary Digest, 1899.
8. The Television"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming."
Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube,1926.
9. Possibility"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
Supposedly said by Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899 – except he probably didn’t. So the last word goes to actor and humorist Peter Ustinov:
"If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can’t be done."
http://ecosalon.com/9_life_changing_inventions_the_experts_said_would_never_work/Excellent find, Chase. Thank you very much. Our mindset can do wonders for us or lead us down the wrong path - to be totally dismissive no matter how obvious the case. Jamie Dimon may be a great banker but he has been so dismissive about Bitcoin and digital currency he is fooling himself. He might be his own best salesman and convinced himself that Bitcoin is "fraud" and that the government would destroy it if it becomes success. I find that argument appalling.
I have been intimately involved in the evolution of portable computers. The evolution was fast and furious. Our ideas were always ahead of computing power, battery technology, wireless communication, bandwidth, material science and much more. We were always working on the next best thing. Yet, the industry has taken over twenty years to where we are today. No matter what we wish our industry may take another decade or two to reach mass acceptance.
DNotes is very well positioned to ramp up rapidly but totally patience and disciplined to do the right thing at the right time. From my prospective 2018 will mark the beginning of rapid expansion and exposure for us. After four years of relentless commitment to build a trusted brand with the most essential ecosystems it will finally be our turn to share the spot light. DNotes 2.0 will help us lead the way.
I always enjoy these lists, even though I know that there are enough opinions about new technology made every day to enable cherry picking the best from history an easy task. For example, in item
5. Data Transmission Dennis Gabor made his foolish statement in 1962. This was 116 years after the first successful fax transmission, and 14 years after Western Union started putting fax machines on desktops around the country with their Deskfax model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaxAs for
7. The Automobile, I'm standing with the Literary Digest on this one. Sure, during 1950–1970 cars gave bikes a run for their money. But since then bikes have sped away from them and currently out sell cars at 10:4 and are increasing that gap.
http://www.worldometers.info/bicycles/Alan, the value of your experience and the depth of perspective that it gives you can't be overestimated. You've seen a lot of impossible things come to pass and nay-sayers frequently proven short-sighted. What impresses me is that you still have a strong sense of what is and isn't possible, and show you are very aware that timing is crucial. Things that seemed impossible or unfeasible, often become successful when their time is right.
I think the valuable lesson we can take from lists of this type is to identify and understand the types of blocks people have when it comes to imagining the future. Many of the things listed could not have come about without significant social disruption, and disruption to the standard industry. The electric light is hard to imagine being successful because it requires a vast network of electricity distribution cables. And nobody is going to pay for that just for the convenience of light. But that is what disruption is all about. No single body would pay for that infrastructure, but when critical mass is achieved, many people contributing make the required contribution feasible.
This is similar with the fax machine. If only two other businesses in your country own fax machines, and you never deal with them, it makes no sense to buy one. But when every other business owns them, sends orders and invoices through them, you have passed the point of critical mass and it makes no sense not to have one.
So by looking at the relationship between disruption and critical mass, a lot of the nay-sayers' predictions, and the subsequent successes of these ideas, make a lot of sense. So now I turn around and look at Jamie Dimon, who for the record I don't believe is a fool, but illegally using his influence to impact a sensitive market for personal profit, but that is my uninformed opinion. His opinion on bitcoin is short-sighted because he doesn't recognise the disruptive potential, and fails to see or believe that there is a point of critical mass for bitcoin. If he stood back and did the mathematics on what the critical mass, or popular adoption rate, of bitcoin would be, and then how this level of adoption would stabilise the currency, he'd see how foolish he was being.
) of the CryptoRuble? If the price doesn't go the way they want it to, what's to stop them from issuing more CryptoRubles, or dumping some of their massive holdings on unsuspecting buyers? I doubt the citizens will even understand what they are getting - a government controlled manipulatable digital fiat (for lack of a better description).
