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> In technological terms, it is old. TCP was created in the mid 70's. The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's an

> In technological terms, it is old. TCP was created in the mid 70's. The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's and even then it was a very small amount of the population capable of using it / benefiting from it. Electric cars were around in the late 1800's. In the early 1900's they were on a par with gasoline / steam powered car sales. It has taken us well over 100 years to get to a stage where they're considered a viable option again for most people again... Bottom line - technology morphs over time so long as there are people passionate about it and continuously working to improve it. There are literally thousands of developers working full time in the blockchain space and it's one of the hottest growth areas around in technology in terms of developer mindshare. It's not going to die any time soon, regardless of what price Bitcoin is.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's The Internet was useful to academic, financial, government and military users in the 1970s [1]. It was built and iterated to solve real problems. Real users' inputs, many of whom were experts in their fields, were incorporated into its design. [1] http://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/ http://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/
- adventured 9y ago
  Not to mention corporate email was popular in the 1980s, long before the Web reached a large number of traditional consumers. Even the Queen of England sent an email across Arpanet back in 1976. Microsoft Mail came along in the late 1980s.
bunderbunder 9y ago
> TCP was created in the mid 70's. The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's and even then it was a very small amount of the population capable of using it / benefiting from it. Using it directly. I don't personally own any equipment that speaks ATM, but I benefit from the existence of networks that use that protocol all time. Heck, I doubt I'll ever touch a Bloomberg terminal, and I'm not entirely sure if their existence really benefits me at all, directly or indirectly, but that doesn't mean financial companies can't easily find uses for them.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago

> The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's The Internet was useful to academic, financial, government and military users in the 1970s [1]. It was built and iterated to solve real problems. Real users' inputs, many of whom were experts in their fields, were incorporated into its design. [1] http://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/ http://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1970s/

adventured 9y ago
Not to mention corporate email was popular in the 1980s, long before the Web reached a large number of traditional consumers. Even the Queen of England sent an email across Arpanet back in 1976. Microsoft Mail came along in the late 1980s.

bunderbunder 9y ago

> TCP was created in the mid 70's. The internet as we know it didn't offer the average user much value until the mid 90's and even then it was a very small amount of the population capable of using it / benefiting from it. Using it directly. I don't personally own any equipment that speaks ATM, but I benefit from the existence of networks that use that protocol all time. Heck, I doubt I'll ever touch a Bloomberg terminal, and I'm not entirely sure if their existence really benefits me at all, directly or indirectly, but that doesn't mean financial companies can't easily find uses for them.