[aliakhtar]

In 2000, about 5-6 years after the internet was easily available to public, I had a dial up connection, email, IM, a web browser, etc in the middle-of-nowhere town in Pakistan where I was born. Bitcoin has been out for close to 6-7 years and does not even come close to the maturity / adoption of internet.

[AnonNo15]

Except Internet was in development since 1969 by the time it became available to public.

Bitcoin whitepaper was released in 2008. Before that even the concept of cryptocurrency hardly existed.

[aliakhtar]

The technologies used in Bitcoin have also been in development for several decades, and by 1998 the first cryptocurrency was already released, according to a quick search on wikipedia.

[AnonNo15]

Note the difference - "technologies used in Bitcoin were in development for X years" vs. "Internet as a whole concept of network of network was in development for Y years".

[aliakhtar]

No, the internet as we perceive it today, as a global network, didn't exist back in 1969. The technologies we use in internet today were developed back then, though. Just like they were for bitcoin (cryptography, merkle trees, etc)

[colordrops]

The technologies used for both bitcoin the internet have been in development for thousands of years.

[dragonwriter]

> Bitcoin whitepaper was released in 2008. Before that even the concept of cryptocurrency hardly existed.

Digital currency was, as I understand, the application usually highlighted for secure (cryptography-based) distributed capability-based computing, as typified by the E programming language in 1997. Not sure if there are precedents going back further or not.

[Mtinie]

While that's a reasonably valid assertion of the state of Bitcoin's protocol development compared against the state of the collection of protocols and services we call the "Internet", I believe that they are similar but not completely relatable.

For the vast majority of people in the World the advent of the Internet was a completely ground-breaking, and completely original, idea. The predecessor technologies that provided similar utility for people (such as phone, fax, radio, television, libraries, social clubs, lunch meetings, etc.) were functions that didn't have a cohesive string that tied them all together and put them in one place. The Internet served that need by providing lots of perceived benefits to people; wide-spread adoption rapidly followed.

On the other hand, Bitcoin has a very specific utility right now -- it facilitates the transfer of value quickly and at (relative) low cost in a (reasonably) anonymous fashion without oversight.

While a significant number of people all around the World use the banking system, I'd wager that if you asked if their banks and investment accounts "worked well enough" that you'd hear a majority say that they do (and then you'd hear all of the caveats of what doesn't work and what they hate about it -- but not enough to seek out alternatives yet).

Bitcoin is still looking for it's toe-hold to convert that mostly satisfied majority. I believe it (or another blockchain-based technology) will find it, and sooner than later, but I am not blinded to the fact that it could end up being viewed in history as simply an interesting experiment that ultimately was ahead of its time.

[aliakhtar]

I'm not the one who said bitcoin was like the internet. Someone else did, I was responding to them.