Comment by a7776f88862 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by a7776f88862 | Hacker News Reader

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> it took almost 20 years for the underlying infrastructure to get mature enough to get mass consumer adoption.

I don't know if you were on the Internet in 1998. I was. The Web was useful, mature, and had tens of millions of paying customers in 1998. In contrast, all the people I have known to use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies only do it for speculation.

You bring up PayPal and list eBay as a "defunct also-ran." The only reason people started using PayPal was to shop on eBay, and the only way PayPal got anyone to start using them for payments was to bribe people with $20 referral bonuses, which they could only do due to their VC firehose of money, and a huge spambot campaign where they pestered eBay merchants with messages along the lines of "I'd like to bid, but I can only do PayPal." (see The PayPal Wars)

PayPal is a great historical lesson in explaining why BitCoin and other libertarian hash chain schemes will fail as a currency, because PayPal was founded on the same deluded libertarian fantasy:

"“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before,” Thiel predicted. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means because if they try the people will switch to dollars or pounds or yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”"

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/who-killed-payp...

The real value of PayPal turned out to be fraud prevention and consumer protection, something that hash chain schemes lack by design.

Bitcoin is for speculation. That's its use-case: it's fundamentally a financial system. It's made a few million people rich and several more million people poor, and started several thousand businesses. That's not a bad track record for something 9 years old; it beats out YCombinator (whose use-case is also "making people rich"), which is almost 14.

I've been on the web since 1994. I certainly found it useful in 1998, but the things it was useful for included:

1.) Looking up Geocities pages for my favorite bands.

2.) Reading rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan.

3.) Playing DragonRealms, an early MMORPG.

4.) Instant-messaging my friends.

5.) Earning money through AllAdvantage.com. Think I made about $40 from them off referral fees.

6.) Looking up information for school papers.

7.) Amusing myself with the HampsterDance.

Streaming video existed but was far too slow and glitchy to be worth watching. Amazon.com existed, but my parents refused to buy anything online. My sister was an avid user of Kozmo.com when she went to college, but then they went bankrupt a year later. MapQuest existed, but took too long to load and still required that you print out directions, since you couldn't exactly bring a computer in the car.

By contrast, I've spent over $5K at about 2 dozen different AirBnBs in the last 5 years (and stayed at a hotel...erm, twice, maybe?). I just booked a haircut online, after reading the Yelp reviews and looking up the location on Google Maps. I spent 15 minutes typing up this comment on Hacker News, which I guess is the spiritual successor to Usenet. I don't own a TV, but I watch a bunch of YouTube and my wife's an avid Netflix user. We get almost all our packages delivered via Amazon.

In terms of how much the Internet changed behavior, a lot more happened in the 10 years between 1999-2009 than the 10 years between 1989-1999, and arguably even more happened between 2009-2018 than 1999-2009.

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