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Depends on how you define early. When comparing the situation of crypto to the internet, I would say we are at around 1997 now. 1996 was the year when Yahoo we
by TekMol 5y ago
Depends on how you define early.
When comparing the situation of crypto to the internet, I would say we are at around 1997 now. 1996 was the year when Yahoo went public and 2021 was the year when Coinbase went public.
The usability of crypto solutions also reminds me of 1997. It is still so bad that it makes them almost unusable. Reminds me of acoustic couplers where you had to manually plug your cable bound phone into some device and dial a number to connect to a bulletin box. Just that today the bad usablity looks very different. It has to do with complicated, privacy violating KYC processes, no standardized secure way to make a socially recoverable secret key, lightning network only used in very few places etc.
TCP/IP and DNS were both developed in the early 70s (1972 I think). So over 20 years before the first internet company went public.
So the adoption of the internet evolved more slowly than the adoption of crypto it seems. As the Coinbase IPO came already 13 years after the Bitcoin whitepaper.
- joosters 5y agoTCP/IP and DNS were both developed in the early 70s (1972 I think). That is more than 40 years before the first internet company went public. Is that really your belief about how to define when a technology became useful?
- TekMol 5y agoThe IPO of a company makes a nice reference point for several reasons: - It is a specific point in time which is easy to look up - To go public, a company needs a big amount of traction already - A lot of data is published for the IPO "Useful" is in the eye of the beholder. But how much the company is "used" can be approximated by its revenue. Yahoo had $1.4 million in yearly revenue the year before it IPOed. Coinbase had $1.14 billion. So about a thousand times more. Even when adjusted for inflation, this should be one or two orders of magnitude more.
- inter_netuser 5y ago>1996 was the year when Yahoo went public and 2021 was the year when Coinbase went public. >TCP/IP and DNS were both developed in the early 70s (1972 I think). That is more than 40 years before the first internet company went public. 1996 - 1972 = 24.
- TekMol 5y agoYay, fixing that!
- meheleventyone 5y agoAdoption of the Internet had serious pre-requisites in terms of the availability of computers in the general population so it’s not really surprising. One thing that was amazing about it was our ability to reuse existing networks to connect them all together.
- TekMol 5y agoI would say the pre-requisites are just as high this time. Just very different. At least you could buy a computer in the 90s. In my country, you cannot buy crypto anywhere. You have to go through some shady KYC process of a foreign company. Me and almost none of my friends are willing to do that. And the very few who do are not willing to sell crypto to the others "Uuhhh no, go make your own Coinbase account." The banks are all "Yeah, we are working on it. We don't know yet when we will offer it. It will take time to figure out the legal and technical aspects.".
- Ekaros 5y agoI thought that crypto was supposed to be easy money transfer to absolutely anyone in the world. For nearly "free". A member of unfounded Amazon rainforest tribe could buy it and send it to for some service a Somalian farmer... For very tiny fee... Then somehow each would be able to convert it from their local currency...
- meheleventyone 5y agoBut crypto currencies are not the only potential use of blockchains right?
- TekMol 5y agoHaving crypto currency is the equivalent of having a computer. I am not aware of anything you can do in the new "cryptonet" as long as you have zero cryptocurrency.
- meheleventyone 5y ago