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Comment by darkerside | Hacker News Reader

For everybody saying cryptocurrency has no use, you must not remember how much trouble society had envisioning the uses for the very internet upon which we are now posting.

Here's an example of a use case recently gaining ground. https://mobile.twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1402388133...

I don't have a crystal ball, but it seems foolish and short-sighted to imagine we are certain that there are no legitimate uses for crypto.

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The internet took like a year to take off since it became commercially available.

It took the world by storm once people could connect to it, and viable and useful ideas and applications (browsers, search engines, eCommerce, filesharing, etc) proliferated at breakneck speed.

It might feel like this but it is anything but true. Prodigy was available in the early 90s and the age of 286 computers. AOL and compuserve were available very early too and for years their uses were email, online encyclopedias, looking up jpegs and eventually chat rooms. Lots of people saw no need for it in the dialup days. It took a decade for the first cable connections to become available.

Right now cryptocurrencies have taken off to an extent. Everyone knows about them but the eco system is a giant mess.

> It might feel like this but it is anything but true. Prodigy was available in the early 90s and the age of 286 computers.

Amazon was launched in 94. My dad was buying books from Barnes and Noble and Amazon and having them sent internationally around 96. By the end of the 90s the internet had 250M users carrying out all kinds of activities, including commercial.

The comparison with crypto just does not stand its ground. It's been 13 years and counting and there is barely anything to show for it except a lucky few people riding Lambos.

[1] https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_internetxfcstx2017.htm

8 years ago I was buying from tigerdirect, newegg and overstock. Bitcoin being crippled to only a few transactions per second for the entire world set things back a good amount which was probably a big part of the point in doing it.

https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/crypto-u...

I think the way Crypto bulls sell this analogy is flawed.

Internet had no competition from any other industry. It was nothing like anything that ever existed. In terms of Internet's development itself, we went from dial up to optical fibers. People in 21st century who use internet have no idea about pains of dial up connection.

Crypto is replacing something that has existed for centuries - the financial system. The financial system being challenged has itself kept up with changing tech, albeit slower than expected. This system is corrupted, exploitative and doesn't provide equal opportunities to all who use it. Crypto has to better the existing system by making things better. But the main point is, crypto itself is the next evolution of financial industry. Internet was a new industry of its own.

The mobile phone industry was also deeply entrenched back in 2007, it still got disrupted wildly within a few years with the iPhone.

If Crypto is so revolutionary, it should have resulted in radical changes within the entrenched financial industry. All we've seen is regression (Stripe supported bitcoins from 2014[0]-2018[1] for eg).

[0]: https://stripe.com/blog/bitcoin-the-stripe-perspective

[1]: https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support

>All we've seen is regression

That's what happens when you only look at Stripe. smh.

Pretty sure every major financial institution is buying crypto because it's obviously superior to the dying and corrupt printer and fax system.

The internet was a communications medium, and not an industry. When it became big enough, it spawned an industry of Big Tech companies. Crypto in this example is the new financial medium. The industry that could be birthed perhaps doesn't exist yet.

There's also the fact that product-lifecycles have become incredibly short these days. Airlines took 68 years to get to 50M users, Mobile Phones 12 years, the Internet took 7 years, and Pokemon Go got there in 19 days[0].

We're at 12 years of Crypto and "a tech of the future" is now an increasingly difficult proposition to make as we're nowhere near real usecases.

[0]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-hi...

Cherrypicked examples. How long did SpaceX take to land a rocket on Mars?

Edit: Also, no response to the SSO use case I shared??

The internet did not take a year to take off. AOL for DOS was released in 1991, and the dot com bust want for another decade. I guess it depends what you mean by "take off", but I'm old enough to remember that in the late 90s, the internet was very poorly understood by most people, and while experts predicted it would be the engine of our economy eventually, your average person couldn't see it.

My dad in Spain, which was an internet backwater back in the day, was buying books from Barnes & Noble circa 96. I was downloading songs off Napster around 98.

The dot com bust, which was around 99/00, was a build-up of huge economic expectations around the internet indeed. Granted that this bubble was mostly caused supply-side (many companies barely had users), but the internet as a whole had millions and millions of users, ~250M circa 99 [1], carrying out all sorts of activities.

Whether most end-users were aware of its true potential is irrelevant - the comparison to crypto, both in terms of timelines (13 years and counting with few applications to show for it) and usefulness, is preposterous.

[1] https://stats.areppim.com/stats/stats_internetxfcstx2017.htm

I am so unbelievably sick of hearing this from bitcoiners.

It just isn't true. At all. There is zero comparison to be made between crypto and the early Internet, its incredibly dishonest.

Email was immediately useful.

The bit that it's hard to foresee all the uses might have some truth. Like tiktok - I didn't see that coming. Or crypto itself which kind of depends on the internet.

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