[Scalestein]

My guess would be that the .com bubble wasn't as easy to get involved in. With Bitcoin you can buy/invest in Bitcoin in 10 minutes with zero prior knowledge. With the .com bubble you had to find a specific stock to buy and go through all the rigmarole of buying it. The barrier to entry to this bubble (if it is!) seems much lower.

[mikestew]

With the .com bubble you had to find a specific stock to buy and go through all the rigmarole of buying it.

You mean click a mouse? Buying a stock in 1999 was a lot like buying a stock now. I don’t recall how fast one could go from account creation to trading, but eTrade has been around for a while. A lot of folks had a 401K account that probably had a trading account of sort as well, so there might not have even been a barrier.

Not saying you might not be right, but buying stocks wasn’t all that hard in the 90s, either.

[workthrowaway27]

I don't know. People at least know what stocks are. Bitcoin is mysterious to most non-technical people and seems sort of sketchy at first glance.

[cableshaft]

Most people have a tenuous knowledge at best about what stocks are or the ecosystem behind the stock market, how to analyze stocks, or what the rules of trading are (I managed to break one when I briefly thought I could daytrade from Sharebuilder years and years ago and got suspended from trading for a few days).

They don't understand it much more than most people understand Bitcoin. Not really. It's all 'buy X and hope the number goes up!', where X is a mutual fund or random company, just like with Bitcoin/Altcoins.

[stordoff]

Most people will at least know that a share is a tiny fraction of a company, and why it has value. Bitcoin is more of a black box (to many), and thus more prone to hype (it's far easier to make grandiose claims about the future of a currency than it is to pretend a company will grow at nearly the same rate).

[Kiro]

That's also what makes it so different.

[ghaff]

I'm pretty sure the opposite is true. Many people are already invested in stocks and, even in the .com bubble, many had accounts with etrade and the like--some of which were part of the bubble itself. All you had to do was transfer your cash/stocks to pets.com or whatever.

With bitcoin, you have to sign up for/transfer money to various sketchy exchanges that you've never previously used.

[fullshark]

E trade and Ameritrade were new companies at the time. Buying stocks on your own without your bank/a brokerage was not commonplace actually and that was a pretty substantial barrier to entry.

[ghaff]

Well, those are brokerages. I assume what you mean is that it was more common to call your broker on the phone and place an order (at a fairly high fee in most cases). That's fair. Even in the US, online trading really came in contemporaneously with the dot-com era. That said, even the newish online brokerages were regulated to a degree we don't see with cryptocurrencies.

[fullshark]

Yes that's a more accurate characterization.

[spdionis]

What are you talking about? Most people in the world barely have access to buy stocks, especially US stocks, without not-so-minor annoyances.