Digital cameras, when invented back in the 70s. It took decades until they were usable, and still another decade until they started to approach the quality of nondigital.
Another obvious difference is that from the first moment they were on the market, they had some practical use, and the amount of use grew quickly. If we count from the Kodak DCS 100 introduced in 1991 at a price of $20,000, then ten years later we see that they were being bought at the rate of 18 million units a year and rapidly rising. [1]
Bitcoin, in contrast, has very little practical use 10 years after introduction. Its merchant adoption peaked years ago. That's far short of what an actually useful digital payments product can do. Look at M-Pesa [2] for contrast. It was introduced only a year early than Bitcoin. It has tens of millions of active users, and processes up to 900 transactions per second, with an average of 160 per second. [3] A huge success compared with Bitcoin's average of 3-4 transactions per second, most of which are speculative rather than practical. [4]
[1] https://www.dpreview.com/articles/5474101424/pmaresearch2003...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
[3] https://www.nation.co.ke/news/MPesa-transactions-rise-to-Sh1...
[4] https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/transactions-per-second
Kodak invented digital cameras in 1975.
> Kodak invented digital cameras in 1975.
DigiCash was founded in 1990 based on a paper from 1983.
And with M-Pesa versus Bitcoin, they're both digital cash, so I think it's even easier to see how badly Bitcoin has done.
Currently there are zero real world practical use cases for cryptocurrency that aren't associated with illegal activity. If anyone knows of legal applications of cryptocurrency, feel free to respond. I'd love to be proven wrong.