Assertion Contradicted
Benet: Academic research proved doubling Bitcoin block size has minimal impact
“The debates that have been raging for the last two years are about relatively minor things, so increasing the block size became this huge holy war, and when you step back and look at what they're talking about, it's just increasing one factor, either by, you k…”
Insight
Benet: Silicon Valley dismissed Bitcoin by missing its core value of verifiability
“And so it's partly for that reason, I think, that Silicon Valley effectively dismissed a lot of the potential of Bitcoin. It just looks like such the wrong thing. If you could, you know, beat the throughput of Bitcoin with a SQLite database in your phone, why …”
Prediction Held up
Benet: High-throughput blockchain scaling implementations will be live within two years
“So expect that to happen over the next year or two. Already there's a bunch of academic results that show this is not only possible, but it's provably so. So now people are building those Implementations, and we'll see them live in the next two years or so.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Benet: 2017 ICO hype cycle peak will lead to greater investment rigor
“We're seeing probably, like, hopefully this is the peak of the hype cycle. Hopefully this will not get worse next year. So hopefully we have now peaked this and it's gonna go back down. And then suddenly we'll get a lot more rigor in investing.”
Insight
Benet: Democratic voting in open-source software often drives projects into the ground
“People did try to come up with voting systems for a lot of open source, and it ended up going worse. So there's some open source projects that were running to the ground effectively by just communities of people effectively using democracy to kind of drive the…”
Assertion Supported
Benet: Catalan government used IPFS to bypass Spanish censorship
“Yeah, so, Catalonia tried to declare independence and tried to vote for it. The Spanish government censored the website, and so then the Catalan government Put their website on IPFS and distributed it that way. So it was pretty cool to see the Catalan presiden…”
Assertion Supported
Protocol Labs bypassed Turkish censorship by hosting Wikipedia on IPFS
“So recently Turkey decided to block Wikipedia and it was very easy for them because all they had to do was intercept, you know, the connection between all Turkish users and the Wikipedia servers outside of Turkey. And so that was like very trivial blocking, bl…”
What-if
Benet: Twitter as a protocol token could have sustained third-party developers
“If you instead thought of Twitter as a protocol token, Twitter, the company, or like the group developing the protocol could totally continue to exist just fine with as many developers on top as you can think of.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Benet: Scammers will exploit retail investors in crypto token sales
“I mean, the reality is that it's going to be super hard for a lot of people to do the diligence on these networks and understand which of them are actually valuable. And there will be bad actors that are going to take advantage of that system and try to scam p…”
Insight
Benet: Bitcoin solved protocol funding by enabling shared ecosystem upside
“Bitcoin came in and gave us the answer, which is you create cryptographic assets that allow everybody in this entire ecosystem to share in the upside of creating this value.”
Insight
Benet: Protocol tokens act as internet-native equity for decentralized networks
“Think about it in terms of company equity. When you're thinking about building technology and so on, it can pay people salaries and dollars and so on. And you can give them equity, which gives them a share of the thing you're creating. And that's what protocol…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Benet: Storing petabytes on AWS S3 is prohibitively expensive
“One is, these things in volume are not actually free, so if you try to store hundreds of terabytes or petabytes in Amazon S III, you're gonna have a bad time. Just thinking about the bandwidth alone, ah, if you actually want to access all that data, it's gonna…”
Assertion Supported
Benet: Bitcoin mining energy consumption exceeded Slovenia's total power expenditure
“Yeah, last we calculated it was more power expenditure than all of Slovenia and so, I think it's much more now because of the recent spike, a lot of miners came in in the last couple of months, so it's a lot of power,”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Benet: Formal verification will soon eliminate costly smart contract bugs
“I would say, in the short term, things like formal verification coming to smart contracts, so we don't have single line bugs that lock up hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Insight
Benet: Web content should be self-archiving and servable by anyone
“And so the point here is all content should be self archiving and should be distributable and servable by anyone.”
Assertion Supported
Benet: A full IPFS node can run directly inside a browser tab
“So there's a lot of innovation, and I think the browser is a really cool platform because you can deploy a full IPFS node directly into a browser tab.”
Insight
Benet: Currency Incentives Create Superior Peer-to-Peer Networks
“But I think today we can We can make a much more effective system by just using currency to mediate that exchange of value.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Benet: Severe storage market inefficiencies leave vast hard drive capacity unused
“There's massive inefficiency right now in how the storage market actually works of if you have spare bytes in, you know, in some disk somewhere, the process that you have to go through to try and sell that in the network is kind of crazy. And so you have massi…”
Assertion Supported
Benet: IPFS core concepts existed for 10 to 20 years before implementation
“A huge chunk of the ideas for IPFS were already discovered long before, and they were just not implemented in a way that people could use them. And it was up to us to take these ideas that have been around for 1020 years, and then put them in such a form that …”
Assertion Supported
Benet: Vint Cerf is deeply concerned about web bit rot
“This is something that Vint Cerf has been talking about recently. He's super worried about A lot of the content disappearing or there's all this bit rot that's happening. So a lot of the old content disappears over time.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Benet: Billions of files are moving through the IPFS network
“There's like billions of files moving through the network and in some capacity, a lot of people in the blockchain space are using IPFS because it fits extremely well with the blockchain model.”
