Clifford Stoll should write a new book dismissing cryptocurrencies and NFTs, etc. You know, like he did for home computers and the internet in Silicon Snake Oil (1995).
In contrast, we’re over a decade into the cryptocurrency push and the primary marketing hook is “buy now so you can sell it to someone else” with nothing anyone would miss if it disappeared. Unlike the internet, it’s been globally available to most of the world so you’d expect uptake to be faster rather than slower.
For example, if you look at the history of Elon's Zip2, the success of an online yellow pages wasn't obvious. Quote itself: "“At that point, very few people were in the internet [business], so it was really a question of, ‘Is the internet going to succeed?’ Which we were huge believers in, and these guys were not.” "
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/03/elon-musk-pitched-the-head-o...
So basically in 1995, you had a lot of believers and non-believers. Exactly what crypto is today.
Look, I get that you need to find buyers for your tokens but lying to people who have first-hand experience is not the way to do that. I gave you a list of things real people were doing then, and it wasn’t even complete. For example, 1995 is the year RealPlayer came out of beta and you had adoption by major radio stations and NPR. Major news organizations like the BBC, Bloomberg, El Pais, etc. were starting to publish online. Amazon had launched the year before. Music fandom and downloads were picking up, lead by college students around the world tired of the mainstream selection by the record labels.
The fact that the yellow pages guys weren’t keen on their traditional business model being disrupted isn’t surprising. That wasn’t uncommon back then, but that doesn’t mean that the people who built their replacements weren’t getting started and finding plenty of people interested in using new alternatives.
The key difference is that cryptocurrency has taken a decade longer and has had almost no outside impact. Most of the things people are building are ways to spend or speculate on cryptocurrency, not doing anything you can’t already do or doing it better. If Bitcoin suddenly disappeared, no non-cryptocurrency business would be disrupted. Nobody who isn’t a speculator would notice a change in their daily life. Even porn sites barely use it, which you’d think would be popular given the US credit card processors’ crusade against naughty content.
Here’s a list of websites started BEFORE 1995 - note that they’re not just people talking about building or selling websites but rather normal things people like as part of their lives which were made better by being on the web: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...
The same could be said about internet in 1995.
The cryptocurrency world didn’t have anything close to those barriers to adoption but still hasn’t come up with a pitch for doing anything most people want to do. There’s no equivalent of the hobbyists sharing photos and tips, businesses communicating better with their customers, people reading the news from other countries, etc.
Do you know how hard it was to digitalise a photo on your computer in 1995?
> businesses communicating better with their customers
I'm sorry, but you are living in fantasyland. Those things didn't happen in 1995. Businesses asking for your email address in 1995... yeah right.
> > businesses communicating better with their customers
> I'm sorry, but you are living in fantasyland. Those things didn't happen in 1995. Businesses asking for your email address in 1995... yeah right.
Again, why are you telling that things I personally experienced did not happen? Two of the three Southern California suburban high schools I attended during that period had email addresses and web access — one of the first public websites I built was for my high school library, linking to sites like Yahoo which would help you find what you were looking for, because it was already that useful for school. The corner taco shop probably didn't have email but an awful lot of professional businesses were starting to use it — a family friend's law firm was using internet email (following a decade of using CompuServe), that graphic designer, etc. 1995 meant Yahoo, Amazon, eBay had launched and were doing real business. You may recall hearing about Al Gore's push to connect universities with high-performance computing centers, too.
Here's that link again — go through the list and think about how many people were using these sites for things which were not related to selling internet access or software:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...
Technical users dominated, of course, but many of them were using the internet incidentally — downloading GNU software, for example, like the first Linux 0.9 kernel I ran — because it was better than what they were doing before. My grandfather is an electrical engineer and technical customers went online quickly because who wants to wait for postal mail to deliver letters and floppy disks when you don't have to?
Note how many are even further away from IT: NIH or astronomy projects, underground music, TV fan arts, members of the U.S. Congress, etc.
I'm sure plenty of people have awesome anecdotes using crypto.
You could also make a list of (investment) companies using bitcoin as a store of value. Or big companies accepting crypto: https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoin/who-accepts/
In Dubai houses are getting bought using crypto.
In 25 years we can have the same discussion of "see, all these big companies were using crypto in 2022"
> I'm sure plenty of people have awesome anecdotes using crypto.
Oddly, you have been unable to provide those examples. Odd that, especially since your “big companies” list includes some like Microsoft who backed away due to volatility and others who immediately convert it into hard currency as part of the payment process. There is nothing world-changing about something like VISA except with higher transaction fees, and none of those businesses would care if Bitcoin disappeared because it's just one of the many options their customers have available for payment. They'd remove a button on their website which a tiny fraction of people use and that'd be it.
> In Dubai houses are getting bought using crypto.
Same deal: they're treating those as cash payments because the cryptocurrency is liquidated before the deal closes, because it's not legally approved in the UAE.
https://www.zawya.com/mena/en/business/story/Can_you_buy_pro...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-yZ-31j9A&t=2s
The Today show was the top rated news program in its timeslot in this era with 6.3 million viewers [1]. They even display and talk about their e-mail address (at ge.com!) even though they clearly had no idea what it really meant (not uncommon for morning TV).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Today_(American_TV_program)#Ra...
Plus, I'm sure there are plenty of videos now talking about how awesome crypto is.
You’ll also note that I said tips - even if photos took time to process and view, people loved sharing advice and work stories.
> businesses were seeing the benefits for product information, sales, support; people were using the web to research and book travel plans; email and chat were becoming quite popular (people had been meeting and getting married online since the BBS era); etc
For "crypto", it's... flipping coins to whoever pays more, doing illegal things and... apparently moving money to Argentina. Anything else?
GM: gm.com - 1992-01-16T00:00:00Z
Ford: ford.com - 1988-09-01T00:00:00Z
Exxon Mobile: exxon.com - 1991-01-03T05:00:00Z
Wal-Mart: walmart.com - 1995-02-23T00:00:00Z
AT&T: att.net (among others) - 1993-12-13T00:00:00Z
General Electric: ge.com - 1986-08-05T00:00:00Z
Mobil: mobil.com - 1991-02-01T05:00:00+0000
Chrysler: chrysler.com - 1993-06-16T00:00:00Z
Altria Group: 2000-03-14T21:05:01Z
So there you have it - 9/10 of the most valuable companies in the world had a domain name and website by 1995 (the only one missing being a tobacco giant). I don't think I would say "most businesses didn't believe it was relevant to them".
[1] https://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_arc...
In 25 years, we can have a discussion of "Look it was obvious, all these big companies were accepting crypto in 2022".
Edit: my point is not that crypto succcess is obvious, my point is that internet success wasn't obvious.
There were only around 500 web servers globally by 1994.
You're accurate in that the plumber down the street, local dentist, bakery, etc likely didn't see the relevance of the web in 1994-1996. 13 years after bitcoin later I've been to maybe five of these types of businesses that take crypto or have anything to do with blockchain. 13 years after the release of the web there were over 85 million websites with a billion eyeballs.
Bitcoin didn't even show up on Google Trends until 2011. Two years after the web 9/10 of the top 10 Fortune 500 had a domain.
I'm doing my best to be respectful but how is this even a debate at this point?
I don't think crypto is doing anything useful. It's been around long enough to have had important things (other than trading crypto tokens) built on it.
I just don't think most businesses saw the relevance of the internet in 1995, but it certainly grew fast and kept growing.
Not trying to be disrespectful, I just think we may be talking past each other a bit.
The big use case was downloading drivers and other things that previously had to posted on floppy disks, which often took weeks.
We also got web browsing, but there really wasn't much up there to begin with. You could play guess the domain name or find a few link listings on some pages. Altavista appeared pretty soon though.
EDIT: Said 1995, but was in fact 1994.
At 13 years from release the web had a billion users.
13 years from release all blockchain networks combined have 100 million users at best.
In an era with ubiquitous internet access, social media, mobile devices, etc new internet based platform adoption rates should always accelerate. For example in 13 years Facebook had 2 billion users.
In the modern era blockchains have 1/20th the adoption rate of a social media site should tell you everything you need to know about the reality of this space - the average person doesn’t see any value in it other than speculative trading.
You must admit that "internet" already had a vast history when it was released in 1990.
The internet is OSI model [1] layers 1-4. Layer 3 is literally called the Internet Protocol. Layer 4 is TCP, UDP, etc.
Web is five (some would say six) and up and was released to the public in 1993. This is well documented.
Blockchain is five (some would say six) and up and was released to the public in 2009. This is well documented.
The OSI network model gives us a way to disambiguate "the internet" by it's component parts and dependencies. The web depended on the physical and network infrastructure that is the internet, as did blockchain.
The web was accessible to at best 15 million people worldwide that had internet access when it was released in 1993. Within 13 years 15 million internet users became 1 billion internet+web users. As others have pointed out for the majority of this time period there were many challenges to adoption yet the web was so clearly and obviously compelling people overcame those challenges to access the tremendous value and utility provided by the web.
Blockchains have been accessible to billions of existing internet, web, social media, and mobile users since release and yet maybe 10% of these users are using blockchain for anything at all.
But I guess you didn't, because that page states the internet was released to the public in 1989.
For kicks let's go with your date of 1989. 13 years later in 2002 the internet/web had 587 million users [2]. Anything blockchain related has 100 million.
I can't understand how even without your understanding the difference between the web and the internet, my being generous and using your (wrong) date, and yet the internet still growing at well over 5x the rate of blockchain helps your argument at all. I don't believe your ability to understand this is the result of stupidity or ignorance - I think it's the kind of blindness and rationalization that can be brought on by faith and greed/financial self interest.
In all seriousness and with the utmost respect - how much crypto do you hold?
What I hate about people here on HN is that they are sure crypto is a fad and will go nowhere. But at this point, nobody can tell. But of course, plenty of people here seem so sure about themselves.
The internet was earlier, but there are two other things to remember: in 1971, a computer cost as much as a house, filled a large room, and required a professional operator. The first microprocessors actually came on the market that year and it took time for people to build devices around them or for those devices to hit the mass market. When that happened, you were getting things like text interfaces and keyboards, tiny amounts of storage on cassettes or floppies, etc.
Similarly, in the United States the phone company monopoly and expensive but slow modems meant you were looking at 300bps connectivity tying up an expensive phone line and communicating with someone outside of your immediate area was expensive per-minute charges.
That got better but it really wasn't until the early 90s that GUIs were mainstream and it wasn't until the mid-90s that computer costs had come down enough to make them affordable to the average person. Similarly, modems were pretty slow and limited so the early web was held back by the fact that a lot of people would need 5 minutes to load a web page with a fullscreen 800x600 image.
Demand for the web is what drove a lot of non-techies to buy a computer capable of running something like Windows 95, because they'd heard of things they could do on the web — whether that was educational research, getting software updates without waiting for floppy disks in the mail, following sports, connecting with other people who shared the same hobby, making travel plans, downloading porn, etc. the first web browsers and email clients were driving a lot of people to buy computers so they could use them. ISPs had sprung up all over the country and faster options like DSL and cable modems were game changers for the experience.
This is a start contrast to blockchain technologies which were close to globally available on day one — even in poor countries, there was at least someone with a network-connected PC — but despite a much longer period of time still haven't found much demand because they don't improve the average person's life unless they enjoy speculating on their ability to resell tokens.
https://kkrants.com/blockchain-the-most-poorly-adopted-platf...
I find it interesting that you're bullish about the space but seem to be one of the few people asking the most important question: why should anyone join? I'm a couple of years older than you and it's been really weird feeling like that's strangely absent — things like CompuServ, the web, social media, smartphones, etc. all had such clear answers for that that people would be asking for help signin up because they knew they wanted it because it'd help them do something (school, trading stocks, gaming, reaching customers, etc.) but weren't sure the best option or something like that. It's been really weird to me that the answer remains nonobvious. I'd be happy even if it was as simple as “we want to turn PayPal into a smoldering hole in the ground” because a) such a deserving company and b) anyone who hears it would know immediately whether it's something they'd like — and that means that people in the space would know they need to hit certain cost and ease of use thresholds.
That's just it - people went through A LOT to get on the web in the early days but the value was so immediately compelling and obvious they considered it worth the effort. As I note in the rant corporations were snatching up their .com within a year or two. How many legit companies have their domain and presence on ENS (which itself has been around for almost five years now)?
Whereas for ENS you have something real to compare to with .com, including registration data. ENS does seem to be getting some adoption mostly at an individual/celebrity level. Here's the leaderboard of top ENS users by # of Twitter followers: https://ethleaderboard.xyz/
I also think the ENS community in general is curious about the questions you're asking. Fundamentally ENS/DNS is pretty boring, so it's hard to get too wildly speculative.
Chains are difficult to compare popularity because of the anonymous nature and how “users” are considered. How do you translate transactions per day and active addresses into users? Almost all users have more than one address. Transfers from hot to cold storage for a single user count as a transaction and involve multiple addresses, as one example.
Bitcoin is 13 years old. Ethereum is seven years old. ENS is five years old. Yet I can’t go to Toyota.eth and learn about their new models or whatever like I could with toyota.com in 1995 (18 months after the web was released).
Note I use the Toyota.com example because when my sister and I first got the internet in rural Wisconsin in 1995/1996 we used to watch TV with a pencil and paper to look for the fine print at the bottom of the screen in hopes for a new web address to visit. Toyota.com was one I remember writing down (for some reason). We thought it was so neat you could see something on TV, type a few letters in the computer, and get “taken” right to it immediately.
Pick a handful of $bigcorps you can think of and hit the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. You’ll find out the vast majority of the Fortune 500 had a website up at a .com within a few years (archive starts in ‘96, I believe). Not to mention the millions of users that had been building websites on geocities and elsewhere since ‘95.
By 2006 the web had over 85 million websites. In 1998 (using five years of ENS) there were over 2 million (including Google). There are currently 247 thousand ENS owners. 13 year old platform. Five year old service. Once again a fraction of adoption when compared to the web over the same time span.
Don’t take this the wrong way but a leaderboard of celebrities with Twitter accounts that starts with Paris Hilton isn’t going to change any minds on the credibility of the platform. Rather the opposite. Frankly anyone who thinks Paris Hilton being the leading proponent of a five year old technology platform is a good thing is either desperate or delusional.
It validates the huckster hype perspective. She was on late night TV recently in a very awkward “interview” promoting NFTs. Many have commented it resembled a video one might see released by someone in a hostage situation reading a propaganda statement [1][2][3].
In any case I’d be more interested to see an analysis of those top accounts and what percentage are actively selling NFTs or any other crypto-something. I’m betting it’s extremely high. Otherwise, there's always the Fyre Fest angle where most celebrities will sell anything with no due diligence or scruples whatsoever as long as the check (in fiat, of course) clears.
ENS is not boring - having an ENS address is a marketing tool to the cryptosphere for whatever you’re trying to sell them. This is one area where it’s identical to DNS.
[1] https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/55313/1...
[2] https://wegotthiscovered.com/news/jimmy-fallon-conflict-of-i...
[3] https://www.pcgamer.com/paris-hilton-and-jimmy-fallon-showin...
Your examples about web dev in the 90s got me wondering "what does Coinbase do today with ENS?". They're fans of ENS, surely whatever's great about ENS, Coinbase must be using it.
Well, as of today their ENS profile isn't anything radical [1], just an address, image, and link to their ENS delegate page.
That gets me thinking more about toyota.com. Do you think they had internal sites and computer resources before their public website? Just makes me wonder where their "toyota.com" site came from, was it as simple as "they heard about the web and then BAM immediately built a website". Wary of doing mental gymnastics myself tho, maybe this all just does mean crypto stuff is overhyped and not very useful.
As a user, I find it fun to chat with other crypto peeps about what they're doing...but talking to the outside world seems challenging. I can't really explain how "CompuServechain" isn't just a waste of time...but I'm having fun so I just keep doing that. I got a site setup on IPFS and connected to a .eth domain!
Maybe the difference is now people aren't coming to you for help with crypto, whereas maybe they were with CompuServe and smartphones? So you're playing a different role.
Oh you might get a kick out of this index of all decentralized ENS websites: https://esteroids.eth.limo/#/
The only requirement I know is that it's directed through a .eth, so the site itself may be boring. But most sites in the index seem to be hosted on IPFS and some even ask for a wallet to have app functions.
Thanks for providing the link; the popular selection[1] is most interesting. The entire space has gone so meta (a little on the nose) most don't even realize it... Imagine if all the internet offered for the first 13 years of it's life was different ways to sell you more internet. That's what the entire space looks like at this point and this link is yet another example - there are maybe three instances of destinations that I could see being even remotely useful, interesting, or usable to anyone outside of the cryptosphere.
I've been really excited about the space since at least 2017. After five years without a single "I can't live without this" moment that excitement has waned significantly.
I realize this may seem like moving the goalposts -- but have you thought about comparing to the development of the internet instead of web? Arpanet 1971 means 13 years in is 1984. I figure you've thought this through so will have some good points for why web/1991 is a better analogy than arpanet/1971.
All the stuff you wrote here is really good. Could be a blog post instead of these more ephemeral comments.
Agree with your assessment that 100 million is an upper bound. I am curious about a deeper analysis as well that involves defining what "real users" are and then seeing how many transactions/wallets meet that criteria. i.e. of that "100 million", how many of them are simply buying and hodling? How many have done a non-exchange transaction (i.e. bought a thing, not coins. Buying NFTs counts! Or a pizza, or buying software, or staking or something)
The comparison to Diner's club is also relevant. 20 years from zero to 51% of all Americans.
Just getting to your "Why has blockchain user adoption been so terrible and what can we do about it?" section and will edit after that.
Edit: Well worth the read. If anything, the title and top image were a bit clickbaity, but the article itself was great, all the way through to the end.
Overall, the key question you point to is "Why did the web grow 10x faster than blockchain? Facebook 15x, and mobile 35x faster?"
I'm curious about this! Is there a recent technology that did grow at 10x over 13 years that we could learn from? Another way to look at this is blockchain is growing at 23% YOY over the last 13 years. What technologies should we compare it to?
Just to pull on the thread, is blockchain more like "hard tech"? If so, that would be really odd since it's not "hard tech". What has EV growth been like?
Here's a chart [1] from [2] that says about 17 million EVs have been sold since 2012. Let's call that 13 years for the sake of keeping the math the same, but the web grew 100x as fast. OK so cryptocurrency is growing about order of magnitude faster than EVs, but why is it slower than the web? What else develops at a speed that's 10x faster than the growth of EVs, but still slower than the web itself?
[1] https://www.ev-volumes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/WW-K-6... [2]
What's interesting about public blockchain data (from a node directly or something like Glassnode) is that the transaction data is so readily available. We can easily analyze transactions and unique addresses. Therefore transaction rates and volumes, long with unique to/from addresses, allow for ready analysis of adoption across the entire chain. For example, Polygon has relatively low trade volume but is very popular for smart contracts (applications). Because of this the ATH high daily transaction count is roughly 9x Ethereum even though Ethereum is considered to be more "popular".
I don't have any better or more valid comparisons for blockchain than what I've presented in that rant. Certainly open to any suggestions. That said, I think there's probably a valid internet law that can be derived stating something like "A new technology paradigm either reaches 1 billion users inside of 13 years or becomes irrelevant" (with the web setting the benchmark at 1B in 13 yr).
Appreciate the feedback on image and title. Perhaps a little clickbaity but I feel the premise is original and I establish some bonafides immediately.
The web and mobile were absolutely hard tech. The majority of web users went from dialup ISPs to cable, DSL, etc. Many thousands of truck rolls, ditches dug, submarine cables laid, increasingly scalable servers, the C10k problem[1], fiber optical cabling and optical switching innovation, etc. The list is almost endless.
Mobile - remember upon the exclusive release of the iPhone on AT&T and the network practically collapsed in major cities[2]? The success of mobile depended on massive build out of additional cellular infrastructure, back hauls, new spectrum auctions, the sun-setting of analog TV broadcasts, etc. Look at the standards (and component standards) for 2G-5G. I'd say that alone makes it hard tech.
EVs are a really hard (potentially invalid) comparison if for no other reason than the average car on the road in the US is 12.1 years old[3]. I don't know how I would start looking at EV adoption for comparison with that thrown in the mix.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C10k_problem
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/technology/companies/03at...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/28/cars-on-american-roads-keep-...
Edit: thinking of other technology adoption curves. Faster than EVs but slower than web and mobile. Thinking of finance too. What's the adoption of NFCs/touchless payments/chips look like? What about the rise of microlending/lending club etc?
Ethereum came along in 2015 and introduced the concept of the Ethereum Virtual Machine and smart contracts. Now "blockchain" is a bona fide platform where people can leverage Ethereum and the underlying blockchain network to build things. Another question - why did it take six years for blockchain technology to progress from digital cash to platform?
Now seven years after that even when combining digital cash (payments), "store of value"/gambling (trading, speculation), and all things smart contract (NFTs, DAO, ENS, microlending, etc) there are still at best 100 million total users for all of these use cases combined.
The web is a platform that stands on top of the internet (which is at OSI model layers 1-4).
Blockchain is a platform that stands on top of the internet too. Difference is that after 13 years no one has been able to create anything of utility with it other than trade tokens.
There's no point in bringing up the history of the plumbing that is the internet from before either of these dates. Besides, as other commenters have noted, the realities of connectivity in the early nineties are so radically different from the release of Bitcoin in 2009 it's absurd to compare the two.
Yet, even when you do, the web still grew at 10x the rate of blockchain in terms of user adoption.
Yes, correct. Well, 1989. Or 1991 for public accessibility. arpanet is not the web.
I hear all your data points. If cryptocurrency fails to take off 10 years from now, we can look back and say "oh we should have known back in 2021". But what do these data points mean if cryptocurrencies take off and change the world over the next decade?