The "Internet" is not really a good comparison. The Internet existed for decades before it took off in the late 90s. And blockchain is part of the Internet--just another protocol.

What you're really talking about is the Web. That's the inflection point. Even email, a non-Web-based technology, saw a huge surge in adoption after free webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo came on the scene.

The big difference between the early Web and early blockchain is the barrier to entry. It was easy to set up websites--still is. That's how you got so many super young people finding huge success out of nowhere.

In comparison, blockchain has an incredibly hard barrier to entry. Not to use it--to build it. If you want to build a robust reliable blockchain, you need very solid cryptography skills. Very few people have that.

The structure of the growth has inverted. In the late 90s you had a lot of people you never heard of, and who were routinely dismissed by industry leaders. But they were building real products that took real business away from old established companies. The Web grew ground-up.

Today, the biggest pushers of blockchain are big established companies. Goldman Sachs. IBM. JP Morgan. The New York Stock Exchange. Big banks, big lawyers, big investors, etc.