Contrast that with crypto, 15 years in and no one knows exactly what's good for, there is no mass of people being helped by it. There are some traces of some people being able to evade capital controls in dictatorships and... That's basically it, no other benefits to the masses have shown up, at all. What was the cost of this benefit? Hundreds of thousands to millions have been scammed out of their money by con-artists.

It was never a solution in search of a problem.

In 1999 the tech wasn't there but everyone could see where it was going, like all investments, it was a matter of timing.

Crypto is still at the fundamental research phase and we don't even have consensus that it does more good than bad, yet.

> I see hardly any use for crypto other than people benefitting (and others hurting) from the ponzi scheme aspects of it

It already facilitates easy transference of funds, an investment tool, citizen-governed, transparent organizations in the form of DAOs from everywhere and anywhere on the planet - which is likely the most important thing at the moment -, impossible to censor apps and publishing on distributed databases and many other things.

Especially the DAOs are something new in human civilization's history, and them being away from your sight or you not having much insight into them does not make it any less important than online credit card payments. Which were originally invented and used by - surprise - porn sites on the early Internet.

So again it comes to the same thing that I stated in the original comment: The early Internet was similar to the blockchain space that exists now - a space that was dangerous for the ordinary non-technical citizen to enter even while it enabled many things that were at the time seen as 'useless' and 'detrimental' to the society.

I reiterate that even the user-generated content, now celebrated as the democratization of content with all its benefits and ills, was seen as 'useless spam' back then. Major publications, newspaper sites did not have any comment section. Corporate sites did not have any kind of user feedback, less, any consideration for users aside from them being able to buy whatever they were selling at the time without making any noise - after all, who were us, the plebs, to be able to comment under the article of a 6-figure/year columnist or give product feedback to an illustrious company. It took a decade for them to come around and have to submit to such democratization of content and the Internet in general after blogosphere, user-driven forums and whatnot changed the landscape. Even today NYT still doesnt permit anyone commenting under its articles.

Its absolutely the same with blockchain today - if you know about it, being savvy enough, if you follow the right stuff, you will find a lot of good stuff. If you aren't, and instead, if you see it as how old people saw the Internet back then, you will see all the bad stuff and it will be a dangerous and unnecessary place for you.

- Scams? Yes, there are lots of scams similar to the early days of the internet where script kiddies could scam people without having special knowledge of computer science, just by downloading some tools with controllable trojans. I remember testing it out back in the days to prank my friends, but it could have been used for actual fraud and as such it was also used. There are many startups now that focus on security for the industry and the auditors are able to catch many problems because of the transparency of open-source. Anybody can read and check the smart contract before using it or trust the auditors, although admittedly there is still a lot of room for a better user experience.

-Investing? Stocks were hit similar or even harder, Facebook for instance is down -75% YTD, Peloton is done whopping -95%(!) from ATH, many more such cases. I find it kind of strange that people unfairly point at crypto while traditional finance is guilty of the same or even worse, remember the SPAC grift? People really need to actually do their due diligence - if they don't, can they really blame anyone except themselves?

Me personally, I find crypto to be an exciting driver for innovations in cryptography research and seeing its actual implementation working in live projects, especially ZK + verifiable computation related stuff. Most of it is working remarkably well _today_ although there is a lot of room for improvement (esp UI/UX wise), I am quite optimistic for the future.

The same for the web.

There were and are scams, but there was value.

The cryptocurrency space, 15 years in, has failed to do that.

However, the article misses something I think by conflating "early internet" with early technical and gaming application rather than "early e-commerce" or something a bit broader.

There was a time when is was not clear why a company would have a website, online presence, or web store, there were lots of failures by people that didn't get it, and lots of naysayers calling bullshit on why companies all wanted to be "on the internet". Turns out there were lots of good reasons.

Crypto is not the same in that it's basically 100% scam at this point, and the cycle is much tighter (as in all tech) between ideas and attempted exploitation. But it is the same in that there are some underlying concepts that get people excited but don't have any real use yet. They probably won't, but in 1997 it was probably pointless for companies to invest in building websites.

Tldr, anything is possible

Everyone I knew was using 90's web. Home pages, websites for companies, movies, etc. It just wasn't really monetized or centralized into the big tech brands you listed. There was already real use for it, even if it wasn't remotely close to its final product form.

There was very little scamming involved. Nothing the likes of which we see with ICOs, pump and dump schemes, etc.

There was also a real spirit of openness and transparency, people pushing open source, an advocacy for a "world wide web", etc. Blockchain is the opposite, where everyone is trying to carve out their own little kingdom and push their own scam coins up.

When we threw the bathwater out after the bubble crash, there were a few babies left.

13 years into the cryptocurrency bubble and I still don't see any productive use. Unless you're in the ransomware industry, or trying to evade sanctions.

You could suddenly order rare books, book plane flights, find song lyrics, and all sorts of stuff you had wanted to do but couldn’t.

I was there at the time. Every year like 11 new great use cases came along. It’s absolutely nothing like crypto.

If you are talking about pre-web, I'd say crypto had that era too, up until around 2012 when bitcoin really took off.

For crypto, the criticisms are well founded. Crypto generates enormous amounts of pollution, facilitates money laundering, the sale of illegal goods and all manner of scams and for what? The shittiest database you could imagine.

The problem with crypto is that all that it is is speculative financial hype. The entire worth of crypto is a bet on its future utility.

The difference between the dot com bubble and web3 is that there is no web3 craigslist or geocities or usenet or altavista or webmd or ebay or amazon or anything of utility or value other than as an investment asset.

The reason I've become a bear on cryptocurrency is that I don't see the utility to justify the monstrous amounts of money pouring into it. It's almost 10 years old and today it's actually less useful than it was a few years ago due to runaway fee growth. The feedback system works in the wrong direction. Did the Internet get less useful the more people used it?

That and I see a ton of scams. Almost all cryptocurrency projects seem like either scams or delusional vaporware projects akin to badly thought out Kickstarters or over-funded boil-the-ocean startups. These things rarely accomplish anything other than to blow a lot of money.

Want to change my mind? Show me the cryptocurrency killer app that people are climbing over each other to use.

... and no, gambling and virtual MLM / pyramid schemes don't count. I mean utility in the real world.

People laughed at email, buying online, payment was even illegal in the beginning.

I was also there at the time from the very beginning.

This is the same thing. Hype, then crash then re-construction then normalized.

There is so much use for blockchain especially as infrastructure for society and in 10 years from now we will not even be thinking about it.

It's no different.