The 90's dot com gold rush is the rhyme to the crypto gold rush. Lots of talk about ecommerce, revolutionary tech, etc. The 2000's saw the sobered outcomes: ads

The 90's dot com gold rush is the rhyme to the crypto gold rush. Lots of talk about ecommerce, revolutionary tech, etc. The 2000's saw the sobered outcomes: ads, ads, ads. All the apps were just conduits to adtech - very wide marketing funnels. Nearly all the actual services had been demonstrated before in a non-monetized, pre-Web context. A16Z is correct in saying that the dot com boom had a major build-out aspect. It needed broadband deployment and intensive consumer marketing. Cryptocurrency has so far demonstrated itself to be more like a bottom-feeder on hardware resources; hardware not being used for something obviously more valuable gets repurposed into mining of some kind, and energy negative uses have so far been accommodated through various kinds of theft of either the energy itself(in industrialized mining) or the compute time(in malware). In this light, the tendency towards specialized compute is not shown to be universal, but part of a set of interlocking arms races - securing systems and energy resources better, finding proofs of work with broader applicability across different kinds of hardware, and creating demand for hardware that is more efficient at those proofs that exist. Cryptocurrency in application is likely to be a one-note phenomenon in the same way that the internet boom became an ad boom - the same services with a little speculative cherry on top. It has a big inherent application simply by being decentralized and tradeable. It can be worse on other dimensions and still succeed by being really good at that one thing, financializing the world in greater degrees, and pushing the arms race forward.