[acdha]

> It's a bit like asking "is the internet just a big scam" in 1998 at a magazine and newspaper trade conference.

1992, maybe. By 1998 all kinds of organizations had seen significant customer demand and business improvements — not just selling penny stocks to each other but finding new customers, reducing costs and delays, offering services which weren't feasible before, etc. In contrast, cryptocurrency is 13 years in without a single success story. Even something as simple as “due to competition, PayPal had to lower their fees” would be a bigger win, forgetting whether there's enough room to recover all of the VC money.

That's the key difference: in 1998, yes, there were obviously doomed dotcoms but they weren't the only thing going on in the web space. You probably even read about this on the websites which had already siphoned off a ton of traffic because investors found it far preferable to go to a website than either wait until tomorrow's newspaper arrived or paying a ton of money for access to one of the paid services.