But at some point it all went off the rails: crypto became a deeply rigged casino targeting the most vulnerable people they could find, fueled by insane amounts of energy consumption and money laundering.
Should we have discarded the whole internet idea because of that?
Scams happened over the internet, but didn't exploit critical problems with the technology itself.
Crypto scams exploit problems with crypto itself. Where else can a tiny mistake allow people to irreversibly drain your account in an instant and vanish?
The Internet Protocol whitepaper was written in 1974.
15 years later, in 1989, real-life use cases of the internet were at least as thin on the ground as crypto use cases today.
I tend to think crypto is used more already than the internet was in 1989?
They are entirely different classes of technology and the second would be completely useless without the first, so like to like comparisons are meaningless.
It had instant messaging, 24hr news, business listings, public databases (similar to wikis), online shopping, prostitution, dating services, online games, public transport ticketing, forums, online payment system, and over 25mil individual people using it on a daily basis.
Apart from the customers, it had all of that from _day one_.