I tend to believe most technology revolutions boil down to: "we made a crappier version of x technology, but it's stupidly cheaper" - cheap enough to throw applications at it.

Diesel trains are not as powerful as steam trains of yore were, but diesel locomotives are so much cheaper to build and maintain that you can run 3-4 of them at a time and still save money.

LCD screens did not produce as good of a picture quality as plasma or even HD CRT screens, but they were so cheap and light you can do things like replace signage.

Crypto is weird. Crypto is proving to not be any cheaper than what it supposed to be replacing (currency, securities). But if you think about what crypto is - it's really an escrow service that's so freaking cheap it's being used for dumb things like payments. But I think like how it took a couple decades for people to start figuring out what they could do with cheap steel, I think eventually crypto might genuinely start finding useful applications.

>I tend to believe most technology revolutions boil down to: "we made a crappier version of x technology, but it's stupidly cheaper" - cheap enough to throw applications at it.

I like this lens, although I'd stop short of saying it's "most" technology revolutions. Rather, it's a counterweight to the common perspective that revolutions are made of radical novelty; the reality is that both forces are important.

My favorite example of this is the home computer. When they came out, they barely did anything; in a world where a "computer" already meant (in some cases) a nice Unix system with editors and compilers and preemptive multitasking and all the sorts of things we still take for granted, they were more like Arduinos. Absolute rubbish. And yet, university researchers abandoned their mainframes in droves to do their data processing on silly little home PCs. Why? Because crappy though they were, they represented freedom. You didn't have to plead to be allowed time on one, or worse hand over your batch FORTRAN program on a giant stack of punched cards (don't drop them) to some overworked secretary in "data processing" and wait a whole business day to get your printout of "error on line 5". Buy a microcomputer, and your allocated time was 24h/day, and your data turnaround was instant. You could even write your thesis on one - bye bye typewriter!

Worse (i.e. cheaper) is better.

> Diesel trains are not as powerful as steam trains of yore were, but diesel locomotives are so much cheaper to build and maintain that you can run 3-4 of them at a time and still save money.

Am I missing something? It looks like hundreds of diesel-electric locomotives are more powerful than the most powerful steam engines ever made.

I went to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_locomotives then sorted by tractive effort/force and looked for the most powerful diesel and most powerful steam.

EMD SD70ACe-T4 - diesel-electric - 200,000 pounds-force (890 kN) starting, 175,000 pounds-force (778 kN) continuous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_SD90MAC (478 built)

GE AC6000CW - diesel-electric - 188,000 pounds-force (836 kN) starting; 166,000 pounds-force (738 kN) continuous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_AC6000CW (317 built)

by comparison:

Erie Class P-1 - steam - 176,256 pounds-force (784 kN) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplex_locomotive (10 built) ("high tractive effort, but low speed, about 10 mph, over short distances" .. "the Triplexes produced huge amounts of tractive effort (TE) that may have been the highest of any steam locomotives before or since").

XA Triplex - steam - 166,600 pounds-force (741 kN) compound - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-8-8-8-4 (1 built) ("unable to sustain a speed greater than five miles an hour, since the six cylinders could easily consume more steam than the boiler could produce")

Power isn't the only factor. Steam engines produce the most power when just starting, which helps explain why the most power steam engines were also so slow.

(Something like the Union Pacific Big Boy had less tractive force, at 135,375 lbf, much higher speeds, topping out at 80mph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_Big_Boy)

Going back to your thesis, in researching this I came across the Kaufman Act, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaufman_Act , which banned steam engines in New York city due to pollution problems. Originally it required electric propulsion, but was amended to allow diesel when that proved viable, and that in turn provided a stepping stone toward dieselization of US trains.

Diesel trains are not worse polluters than steam, so your thesis doesn't really seem applicable.

I assume they meant that the diesel trains were not as powerful when first implemented, but they were cheaper.

It fits with their other examples much better.

Except the Kaufman Act link points out that diesels were introduced in NYC because the didn't pollute like steam locomotives.

That doesn't fit OP's thesis at all.

Definitely not current diesel trains, but maybe gp is referring to when they were first introduced.

The sentence uses "Diesel trains are" and "steam trains of yore were" - past vs. present.

Take the 2-8-0, which https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-8-0 comments:

> From its introduction in 1866 and well into the early 20th century, the 2-8-0 design was considered to be the ultimate heavy-freight locomotive. The 2-8-0's forte was starting and moving "impressive loads at unimpressive speeds" and its versatility gave the type its longevity. The practical limit of the design was reached in 1915, when it was realised that no further development was possible with a locomotive of this wheel arrangement. ...

> During World War II, 14 of these locomotives were equipped with superheaters, which raised their tractive effort from 28,777 lbf (128.0 kN) to 33,557 lbf (149.3 kN)

Then compare to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMC_E3 , a diesel from 1938 with "Tractive effort Starting: 56,500 lbf".

That's from time when people became convinced that diesel was better than steam. Why? Quoting https://www.american-rails.com/diesel.html

> This changed after General Motors successfully demonstrated the diesel's viability during testing of its FT freight design in 1939.

> The demonstrator set toured the country, convincing skeptic after skeptic that diesels were not only efficient and reliable but could also outperform the iron horse.

Not simply because it was dirt cheap.

Stats at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_FT . The top speed of 95 mph is 15 mph higher than the Union Pacific Big Boy.

Note also "Steam locomotives could be built with fewer precious materials, and with less conflict with military needs.", which is yet another factor that OP's thesis didn't consider.

Did you catch things like "no further development was possible with a locomotive of this wheel arrangement" and from earlier "the six cylinders could easily consume more steam than the boiler could produce". These designs were pushing the limit of what steam could do, and diesel looked like it could pass those limits. And did.

While I don't think that cryptocurrency is about to kick off a technological revolution on par with the industrial revolution, it is important to note that the technological advancements that led to here weren't readily apparent when they were invented either, except to slightly zany visionaries. The invention of the automobile for instance was seen for a few decades as a rich person's toy. People usually have small minded views of the implications of new technology, because we look at them through the lenses of the world we live in now.

So of course cryptocurrency hasn't led to much beyond speculation. Not to say that it will lead to anything more, but it would be erroneous to discount that possibility off hand. At the very least IMO it will lead to a social revolution, of what magnitude I don't know.

Also I'd note, the industrial revolution really came to the dirty masses with the assembly line, not the invention of the steam engine or the automobile. So analogously with regard to cryptocurrencies, maybe they are the car in this scenario, and the real revolutionary technological advancement that leverages them has yet to be invented. Or, maybe not.

Personally, I think that much like the apparently dire state of the world at the dawn of the industrial revolution led directly to it, the things we think now of as symptoms of Armageddon are probably going to play a large and in hindsight constructive role in whatever comes next. Maybe climate change becomes a crash course in terraforming, or genetic and biome engineering. Trying to predict what happens next is a fools errand but these are fun possibilities to think about.

Better battery technology won't allow mobile device electronics to run cooler. We need more power efficient chips using the upcoming 3 nm process technology.

If robots were way cheaper it would change quite a bit.