Some people, dare I say most people, won't or can't see change until it's already happened. I used to think it was only because they happened to be out the loop and didn't get exposed to the idea. Since I discovered crypto in the summer I've seen that they can see it right in front of them but they're unable to truly see the implications of this technology. It's like they can only connect the dots retroactively.

I've got the sense from talking to people that it may even come in part from very different ways to perceive reality. All the most innovative ideas, that is to say ideas that were of a sufficient leap forward, were created by those who were able to see two essential things. First, to believe there probably is a far better/efficient way to do things. Two, that the solution or better way may not exist yet and the answer may well lie outside of the box. It's one thing to look at improving existing technology but it's what we call "visionary" if we're able to create something which fundamentally changes everything and not by accident. A line I like from an Andreas Antonopoulos talk about Bitcoin is, "just like with the internet things that were previously unthinkable, are now thinkable".

The truly innovative person is one who sees the past as something that which has happened as a matter of record, rather than something which controls the present and therefore by extension the future. Where new ways of doing things is seen as freely possible because we're not a prisoner of the past.

I've had people personally make the argument I'm sure you've seen as well, that crypto will never take off because there's so few places currently to spend it right now. I'm amazed this even sounds reasonable enough to say without the individual becoming aware how silly it is half way through uttering it. Although there are many great examples I always use email and computers. You could say no one's going to use email, it will never take off, because look how hardly anyone has a computer in their home. Obviously this is a completely backwards way to see things. Those that see things this way can't truly innovate. They can only see one step ahead, a minor modification to an existing structure, they can't generate anything novel. It's not possible for them to be able to see the sense in any idea if it didn't already exist and for which the infrastructure isn't already there. For the same reason they couldn't see it before, after it's already happened they can look at the transition and then it it seems perfectly clear. Now they can see it, but all that's happened is the line has been moved.

It's sort of like the mistake you can see in retrofuturism where they couldn't conceive of the internet and how we'd use our phones in regards to social media. Instead any conception of the mobile phone was just a regular phone except smaller and more portable. Even the computer just got smaller but they imagined most notably as something we'd use to make video calls, or as a more efficient library. You might think that's fairly close but it is actually very different because it was mostly just imagining what already existed, but smaller. But the true meaningful innovations were missed completely and that's because they really had much less or nothing to draw from to be able to imagine it.

So it is with Bitcoin, in that the implications are so incredible and vast that it's difficult to even imagine it. The evolution of money to a digital worldwide trustless network owned and controlled by no one is a technological disruption of such significance in the history of humanity it's going to invariably be something impossible to understand by most people for the same reasons I gave before. They'll only be able to see it after it's already happened, because then it will be the past, then it will seem obvious.

(tagging also @futuremind)