[capableweb]

> The internet had obvious and wide ranging use cases that were immediately apparent to everyone

In hindsight it might seem so, but it really wasn't. Most people who didn't already see these "wide ranging use cases" thought the internet was mostly about shady stuff.

[danaris]

You can keep telling yourself this to convince yourself that crypto will be as big as the Internet someday, but it is absolutely not the case.

Sure, there were some old fogies (actual advanced age not required, but common) who thought in ~2000 that the Internet was nothing but a passing fad, but anyone with actual sense—including many, many people who were not at all financially invested in tech companies—could see that there was plenty of real substance there, however overly-inflated some valuations were at the time.

By 2000, we already had, very firmly-established, companies like Amazon and eBay, that were clearly worthwhile Internet marketplaces making it vastly easier to buy & sell things.

In 2022, the most "firmly-established" things we have in the blockchain landscape are the cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, whose sole purpose is to be a different kind of money and/or speculative vehicle. Effectively the only people pushing these things are the ones who stand to lose lots of money when they finish crashing.

[capableweb]

> You can keep telling yourself this to convince yourself that crypto will be as big as the Internet someday, but it is absolutely not the case.

I own zero cryptocurrencies and would rather see the entire ecosystem crash down just to bring the people behind it back to reality. I'm just writing about my experience from the perspective of someone who experienced the "beginning of the internet as mainstream media" for the ones who didn't.

[danaris]

I was definitely there, as were a bunch of the rest of us. Your experiences are not universal.

[giaour]

I was young at the time, but this doesn't match my recollection. Everybody thought businesses whose value was measured in "eyeballs" were scams, but the internet was well established in industry, government, and academia.

Yahoo and Amazon didn't look fundamentally different from Pets.com to me at the time, but they managed to survive.

[SketchySeaBeast]

I think we're probably disagreeing on "immediate", I was thinking by the time of the late 90's. You're right, it would have been less obvious when it was a pile of universities communicating together. But regardless, by the time of the dotcom crash my family in rural Northern Alberta had the internet.