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Comment by cowtools | Hacker News Reader

The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has.

If there was a "super-centralized" network that already had major success (for example, imagine a world in which teletext or something was dominant before the internet) then the internet/web may have had a serious competitor. Instead, the internet was largely reverse-compatible with previous networks such as the phone network through dial-up.

Additionally, the latest wave of cryptocurrency hucksters have been selling their cryptocurrencies as a solution for a problem that cryptocurrency just does not solve. It is one thing to claim that they're wrong; it's another to claim that cryptocurrency has failed its original purpose entirely.

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Of course it had to.

There were absolutely successful networks. AOL (America Online) was the biggest, while CompuServe was the older one.

I remember (alas) consciously choosing not to invest in .com domain names in the mid-90's because I assumed both they and AOL room names (if that was the term?) would just be passing fads on the way to whatever better newer network would exist ten years later, with a newer name system.

The internet absolutely had to overcome America Online, at least in the US. (It helped that, early on, many/most people could access the internet via AOL, before local ISP's became widespread.)

> The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has.

It's hard to imagine how one could define the growth of the Internet as anything other than network effects - its value to end users has always been a function of how many end users there are, which is literally the definition of a network effect.

Edit: To expand a little, considering I don't know if you were aware of the early/mid 1990s, but in those days most people didn't have a computer at home, and in many places phone calls were charged per-minute. It was a significant thing to buy a PC and learn how to use it and pay a lot to go online.

>The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has.

This line of thinking is extremely dangerous, even moreso for something that's claiming to be a currency. This is the mentality that lead to these ponzi-like schemes; the promoters are prioritizing growth at all costs for the sole purpose of overcoming the network effects. Not because they actually built decent products.

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