Except it wasn't. The "early internet" was ARPANET in like the 60s, and it was already being used by researches and US government agencies to coordinate and share information and cooperate. The internet was already decades old by the 90s, with an extensive track record of being useful. The 90s weren't an early age of the internet, it was the early age of internet security that allowed you to use your credit card through the internet and be sure it wouldn't be stolen.
Pretty much right away after that was possible, Sears had an integration to buy stuff from them over the internet. Shortly after that, Amazon was founded.
The early days of bitcoin was the 2010s, and several companies tried to integrate with it, including web stores and Steam, and they all eventually removed their integration because crypto makes terrible money, so nobody was using it.
> Except it wasn't. The "early internet" was ARPANET in like the 60s
'Early Internet' as in public usage. Not its research roots.
> The 90s weren't an early age of the internet, it was the early age of internet security that allowed you to use your credit card through the internet and be sure it wouldn't be stolen
That must be an alternate internet in an alternate timeline. From mid 90s to mid 2000s the Internet was a pretty dangerous place for any non-technical folk to use their credit cards anywhere. You must be looking from a tech-savvy person's perspective just like how you took the 'early Internet' to be ARPANET.
> crypto makes terrible money
If your understanding of crypto is limited to that, its no wonder you have the perspective that you have. Just like how many people said that the community forums back in early 2000s were 'plebs' spamming the internet.
> w the internet was useless and online commerce was not going to work.
Except I had my first internet connection in 1994, have worked all my life to help companies transition to digital economy and I believed internet and e-commerce were going to work because they solved a problem
Bitcoin doesn't
> but there's people doing R&D on this TCP to improve its efficiency and effectiveness.
10 years after the only killer app for crypto is avoiding taxation and buying drugs online (if we exclude paying for ransomware, which I don't consider a killer app)
10 years after internet was born (some say it's 1983, some say it's 1990 when TBL release the first version of an HTTP server) had already changed the world and had many killer apps (email, FTP, NNTP, DNS, gopher among the more popular)
P.s. my first experience with networking was in high school, a 1mb token ring local net in the computer science lab filled with IBM pcs with 4MB of RAM running OS/2
P.p.s. my first programs were written in Rexx and C
I was around before the web days so I quite remember that time well. While there may have been scam sites, it was a significant minority to the main usage of the web at the time (mostly hobbyist pages and early corporate usage in addition to a lot of porn).
Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. Maybe some day someone will figure out a legitimate usage that isn't a cover for all the stuff I mentioned. It will be very interesting to see what survives after the end of QE/ZIRP.
> Exactly. The early internet was full of promises of taking over retail. None of that worked, at first. Instead the internet was useful for messaging and putting up personal websites. All the responsible people at the time kept whining -- how is it going to make money??
What? This is nonsense alternate history.
The early Internet had active, useful messaging long before anyone thought it would be useful for "retail". The arrival of commercial spam on Usenet was a shock to everyone. And personal websites came before the dot-com craze.
> They keep insisting that it's all a joke, and yet every single day the level of adoption keeps on increasing.
Do you have a citation for that claim? The people hoping to get rich quick in the space are active but there's almost no usage by the general populace.
> I feel like I'm watching the internet be born again.
The early internet had huge barriers to adoption (computers were expensive, network connections were expensive and glacially slow), but each phase of expansion had immediate popular uses. As an example, the web was ~1990, NCSA Mosaic came out in 1993 (Netscape was 1994) and by 1995 it was a household term with rapidly growing personal, business, and government usage for a wide range of tasks. In the earlier era, things were more limited due to connectivity issues but there were still substantial numbers of people using email, usenet, FTP, etc.
In contrast, Bitcoin has been out for 11 years, didn't have any of the barriers to adoption like the early internet, but if it disappeared tomorrow almost nobody outside of the industry would have any interruption in their lives.
> Remember TCP/IP was developed in the 1970s so it took almost twenty years before HTTP came out, and another 5-10 years before people really started using it.
There were significant barriers to entry – network connections were slow and enormously expensive into the 90s – but TCP already had significant value by the 80s (see e.g. FTP). Within a few years of the web arriving in the 90s, there were businesses using it for revenue-positive activity.
In contrast, blockchains were available to everyone on the Internet very early on and have yet to find a single case where they’re cost effective despite the barriers to entry being orders of magnitude lower.
> it was a significant minority to the main usage of the web at the time
It wasn't. Your perspective seems to be skewed just like the other commentators who think that the early internet was a 'nice place' because their usage was specifically shaped by academic research, corporate and government usage and their tech-savviness.
The public Internet was a pretty wild and dangerous place for the non-tech savvy masses. Which is one reason why the Internet did not take off to become what it is now until after mid 2000s and many business practices and trust-generating systems and services were established, along with mobile devices enabling everyone to access it.
>People compare the Internet to web3, but it is a false comparison.
Forerunners to the modern Internet were useful from the get-go. ARPANET was designed to share data and compute resources between government and university labs. Two years after ARPANET came online, the first email system was developed on it. ARPANET had actual value and use cases immediately, and kept adding more.
If we're comparing the development of the Internet to that of web3 (or whatever they call blockchain technology these days), then it's safe to conclude the latter has very stunted development.
> That isn't a very solid argument - they had ISPs and TCP/IP and emails in 1970s [0] and yet HTTP/Netscape/Amazon/Google/the rest of what the modern internet is used for didn't exist before the 90s.
No, not a solid argument would be counting the adoption of "blockchain" from when it was created, but everything else from the 1970s for some reason.
>Never did we only make websites just "because it was fun" any more or less than we do now.
The early internet was incredibly frivolous. Commercial activity was completely banned on ARPANET and NSFNET. SSL didn't come along until 1995. There was a brief but significant period before the first browser wars and the dot-com bubble, when lots of people were interested in this new internet thing but nobody knew what it was for.
I don't want to return to those days, but it's hard to overstate the extent to which the internet was just a toy for geeks.
>Our parents/grandparents invented the internet but didn't find ways to turn it into what it is today.
Repeating this over and over again doesn't make it true. Google, Amazon, and Ebay we're established in the first year of the eternal September, and immediately started changing people's lives. We're 10 years after Bitcoin, and still with nothing to show for it but money laundering and pump and dump schemes.
> Many of the internets early adopters were actual criminals
the early adopters were college students and professors since that's where it was available. as far as "criminals" it would have only been those pesky "hackers" who were mostly acting from curiosity. there wasnt any big opportunity for financial fraud on the "internet" because there was no commerce on the internet. the commercialization had to happen first and that required massive buy-in long before criminals could have any fertile ground to operate upon.
> and its detractors talked about how it "couldn't scale",
ive never seen such a thing, in the early 90s most of us didnt even have terms like that queued up
> Many people were saying this, Paul Krugman (one of the leading economists) went as far as comparing the internet to the fax machine:
And he caught a bunch of shit for it, even at the time. You keep trying to conflate critics of Bitcoin, many of whom have technical & finance backgrounds, with the largely non-technical crowd that didn't understand the web back in the 90s.
> I'm too young to live through it, but luckily I studied it in university :-)
What's the name of this "history of the internet" course(s) you took? The most historical context I ever got consisted of maybe a few intro paragraphs on Arpanet in my networking 101 class.
>
It's weird because people compare it to the early days of the Internet... but the early Internet was useful from its beginning: you could at least send messages and files across the network, which was incredibly useful to academia and the military and was orders of magnitude more efficient than any alternative.
How is running an ICO not useful to people? Get lot of money with only doing a lousy whitepaper, drive ferrari and live luxury life rest of your life. No joking, many people can't imagine anything better.
> 99.9% of the world population couldn't fathom how Internet would take off back then when it launched.
The dotcom bubble was fueled by speculation in how useful the internet would be. Granted, it busted but many companies survived it and some are now the biggest companies in the world.
> That was why it was not mainstream for a long time until it took off.
Most of the dominant platforms today have only existed for less then 20 years. That's... only yesteryear. There's absolutely zero guarantee that they will be around for another 10, 20 or 30 years.
Why? Because it's par for the course for empires to come and go. Ma Bell had an absolute monopoly on a telephone network in the U.S. until they got broken up in 1982. That happened. Few large corporations are over 100 years old, and even so, they aren't the same they were back in the day.
The Internet still consists of the same basic building blocks and technology as it did 10, 20 or 30 years ago. TCP/IP, UDP,... Beyond your wireless access point, it's all just fiber and UTP spanning the globe. Oh, and data centers with racks of computers to linked one another. Beyond computing power and other trappings, it's all conceptually not that different from what it has always been.
I've always found it a strange how we have been myopically staring at FAANG companies in the Valley over the past 20-30 years. You know how that has come to be? Damn excellent marketing on their part. That's all it ever was.We all know it, but we don't really admit to it. And so we laud them as these powers of nature that you can't get around. Even though they are anything but, really.
For all intents and purposes, large swathes of the Internet and the Web are dark, but they are very much there. For instance, there is more then just English in the world. The Web in Asia looks radically different, beyond what Baidu or Alibaba offer.
Sure, the early web has died. But neither do you find 19th century newspapers or obscure popular literature in modern bookstores. You'd got to a library or an archive for those. We have the Internet Archive for good reason.
What hasn't died is the technology and the basic ideas of that era. Those are very much alive in small communities all over the Internet. And that's totally valid and in no way inferior to what large platforms offer.
Yelling that "x has died" and "the problem was solved", well, no, that's a very simplistic take on reality. If something works perfectly for someone, well, why do you forcefully imply that what they want is without value and thus a waste of time? Por que no los dos, right?
As too FAANG, ask yourself this: When they publish reports about their numbers of users, how much of those represent actual use of those platforms? How many accounts are truly dead and unused? How many people are really using Twitter on a daily basis for hours on end and aren't just hopping all over the place? Why would we accept those reports at face value? Because they are valued billions of $?
Remember, it's all about keeping the music playing and the party going. And today's "big instutions" aren't the first DJ's at the decks, nor will they be the last. History always catches up in the end.
And meanwhile, others will always do their own thing, write code, build cool things and invent new ways of communicating.
> And one major aspect I keep coming back to is that web technologies in the 90s, and even their descendent technologies now, are simple enough for most technology-literate people to understand, and that carried with it a lot of comfort and trust.
I was a 9 year old building websites in the 90s, and while I could write HTML and upload files via FTP, I had no clue about TCP/IP stack, socket implementation on the filesystem, how Windows 95 and Windows NT core worked, how my Pentium processor worked, and about a thousand other technologies that I used in the process. I relied on abstractions.
> The world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies and "web3" feels vastly more opaque and esoteric by comparison
Nobody's stopping you from just as blindly trusting underlying web3 abstractions as you did in the 90s with the web. But we're professionals who learned not to do that and have drastically different approach to technologies that we use. We're not 9 year old kids anymore. We had to learn these things after waking up to an outage, or after our site struggled with 10 requests per second (because we didn't know that database indexes existed), or after any other number of perfectly valid reasons. Now we don't trust tech, we read the whole documentation, and we want to dig in.
The world hasn't changed as much. It's us who's changed.
> The reality is that the internet was immediately extremely interesting (either useful or fun) for practically everyone who got access.
That's quite an absurd statement to make. I can easily find people right now that find no interest in the current internet, it's literally impossible that in the past it would have been different with way less interesting things to do on it..
There's a huge bias in what you state. I have no doubt that plenty of people who got access at the time found it interesting, but the thing you ignore is that theses are the one that found it interesting that got access in the first place.
Like sure email are incredibly useful, but to send to who? It's is right now that I can send them to 2 billions users, but in 1996, that was 16 millions... kind of much less useful, the chances are most people you knew, didn't knew anyone that was on it at the time... thus literally useless. FTP are nice, but plenty didn't used computers at all, sharing files meant nothing. I know so many right now that have trouble sharing files, yet FTP still exist... no chance they would have shared any in the past.
You are now on that team, the ones that don't have any use for it right now. It's fine that you don't find it interesting, but please don't be that old grandpa that scream "get out of my lawn" please...
> The early Internet was infinite times more fun.
Curiously, I've seen tons of people having fun with cryptocurrencies, in different ways, you are just not part of it...
> Except it wasn't. The "early internet" was ARPANET
While the Web may be the face of the internet most people are familiar with, the “early web” is not the same thing as “the early internet” which, in turn, is not the same thing as “precursors to the internet”. It wasn't the internet, or even an internet, until non-ARPANET networks were connected (e.g., CSNET), and there wasn't a world wide web until HTML & HTTP & browsers were designed and deployed on the internet.
Except it wasn't. The "early internet" was ARPANET in like the 60s, and it was already being used by researches and US government agencies to coordinate and share information and cooperate. The internet was already decades old by the 90s, with an extensive track record of being useful. The 90s weren't an early age of the internet, it was the early age of internet security that allowed you to use your credit card through the internet and be sure it wouldn't be stolen.
Pretty much right away after that was possible, Sears had an integration to buy stuff from them over the internet. Shortly after that, Amazon was founded.
The early days of bitcoin was the 2010s, and several companies tried to integrate with it, including web stores and Steam, and they all eventually removed their integration because crypto makes terrible money, so nobody was using it.
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