Stoll wrote that book in 1995 after the internet was noticeably changing the world. People were flocking to sign up with ISPs; businesses were seeing the benefits for product information, sales, support; people were using the web to research and book travel plans; email and chat were becoming quite popular (people had been meeting and getting married online since the BBS era); etc. It’s also important to remember that computers cost a lot more, network connectivity was even pricier, the software was primitive, and all three were incredibly slow by modern standards.
In contrast, we’re over a decade into the cryptocurrency push and the primary marketing hook is “buy now so you can sell it to someone else” with nothing anyone would miss if it disappeared. Unlike the internet, it’s been globally available to most of the world so you’d expect uptake to be faster rather than slower.
Your claim that the internet was noticable changing the world in 1995 is not accurate at all.
For example, if you look at the history of Elon's Zip2, the success of an online yellow pages wasn't obvious. Quote itself:
"“At that point, very few people were in the internet [business], so it was really a question of, ‘Is the internet going to succeed?’ Which we were huge believers in, and these guys were not.” "
> Your claim that the internet was noticable changing the world in 1995 is not accurate at all.
Look, I get that you need to find buyers for your tokens but lying to people who have first-hand experience is not the way to do that. I gave you a list of things real people were doing then, and it wasn’t even complete. For example, 1995 is the year RealPlayer came out of beta and you had adoption by major radio stations and NPR. Major news organizations like the BBC, Bloomberg, El Pais, etc. were starting to publish online. Amazon had launched the year before. Music fandom and downloads were picking up, lead by college students around the world tired of the mainstream selection by the record labels.
The fact that the yellow pages guys weren’t keen on their traditional business model being disrupted isn’t surprising. That wasn’t uncommon back then, but that doesn’t mean that the people who built their replacements weren’t getting started and finding plenty of people interested in using new alternatives.
The key difference is that cryptocurrency has taken a decade longer and has had almost no outside impact. Most of the things people are building are ways to spend or speculate on cryptocurrency, not doing anything you can’t already do or doing it better. If Bitcoin suddenly disappeared, no non-cryptocurrency business would be disrupted. Nobody who isn’t a speculator would notice a change in their daily life. Even porn sites barely use it, which you’d think would be popular given the US credit card processors’ crusade against naughty content.
Here’s a list of websites started BEFORE 1995 - note that they’re not just people talking about building or selling websites but rather normal things people like as part of their lives which were made better by being on the web:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...
No, it couldn’t have. I’ve given you a ton of examples of people using it for things other than selling internet access or software: all of those people went out of their way to get access because it let them do things they wanted to do, often buying expensive new computers to do so.
The cryptocurrency world didn’t have anything close to those barriers to adoption but still hasn’t come up with a pitch for doing anything most people want to do. There’s no equivalent of the hobbyists sharing photos and tips, businesses communicating better with their customers, people reading the news from other countries, etc.
> > businesses communicating better with their customers
> I'm sorry, but you are living in fantasyland. Those things didn't happen in 1995. Businesses asking for your email address in 1995... yeah right.
Again, why are you telling that things I personally experienced did not happen? Two of the three Southern California suburban high schools I attended during that period had email addresses and web access — one of the first public websites I built was for my high school library, linking to sites like Yahoo which would help you find what you were looking for, because it was already that useful for school. The corner taco shop probably didn't have email but an awful lot of professional businesses were starting to use it — a family friend's law firm was using internet email (following a decade of using CompuServe), that graphic designer, etc. 1995 meant Yahoo, Amazon, eBay had launched and were doing real business. You may recall hearing about Al Gore's push to connect universities with high-performance computing centers, too.
Here's that link again — go through the list and think about how many people were using these sites for things which were not related to selling internet access or software:
Technical users dominated, of course, but many of them were using the internet incidentally — downloading GNU software, for example, like the first Linux 0.9 kernel I ran — because it was better than what they were doing before. My grandfather is an electrical engineer and technical customers went online quickly because who wants to wait for postal mail to deliver letters and floppy disks when you don't have to?
Note how many are even further away from IT: NIH or astronomy projects, underground music, TV fan arts, members of the U.S. Congress, etc.
It's not just personal anecdotes — you have conspicuously ignored all of the links you've been given to major business and mass media showing adoption. I've tried to assume good faith but to be honest this is reminding me a lot of when a creationist tries the “god of the gaps” technique trying to ignore the overwhelming evidence that their claim was wrong and instead tries to pick away at whatever small detail they think is easiest to attack.
> I'm sure plenty of people have awesome anecdotes using crypto.
Oddly, you have been unable to provide those examples. Odd that, especially since your “big companies” list includes some like Microsoft who backed away due to volatility and others who immediately convert it into hard currency as part of the payment process. There is nothing world-changing about something like VISA except with higher transaction fees, and none of those businesses would care if Bitcoin disappeared because it's just one of the many options their customers have available for payment. They'd remove a button on their website which a tiny fraction of people use and that'd be it.
> In Dubai houses are getting bought using crypto.
Same deal: they're treating those as cash payments because the cryptocurrency is liquidated before the deal closes, because it's not legally approved in the UAE.
The Today show was the top rated news program in its timeslot in this era with 6.3 million viewers [1]. They even display and talk about their e-mail address (at ge.com!) even though they clearly had no idea what it really meant (not uncommon for morning TV).
Yes, actually. That year I was helping a family friend with his graphics design business build a website for it. He had a scanner for use in his print work - remember, Mac users had been using Photoshop since 1988 and it wasn’t the first to market - which we used to scan photos in addition to other work samples. It wasn’t cheap but it was routine - and compared to other pro photo equipment it’s not like cameras and lenses were free either.
You’ll also note that I said tips - even if photos took time to process and view, people loved sharing advice and work stories.
but... what is this stuff used for? the OP just gave you a ton of use cases for the Internet in 1995 which you ignored?
> businesses were seeing the benefits for product information, sales, support; people were using the web to research and book travel plans; email and chat were becoming quite popular (people had been meeting and getting married online since the BBS era); etc
For "crypto", it's... flipping coins to whoever pays more, doing illegal things and... apparently moving money to Argentina. Anything else?
Sorry to disappoint, but in 1995, almost nobody had any real benefit from email (except maybe some universities). If you think email was mainstream back then, your memory is playing tricks on you.
Look at the WHOIS registration dates for the internet domains of the Fortune 500 in 1996. Almost all businesses knew within a few years that it was valuable to them. Go on the Wayback Machine (starts in '96) and check out the various websites for General Electric, Toyota, GM, you name it. They were there. Here's a taste from the Fortune 500[1] in 1996:
So there you have it - 9/10 of the most valuable companies in the world had a domain name and website by 1995 (the only one missing being a tobacco giant). I don't think I would say "most businesses didn't believe it was relevant to them".
I don't know why we've moved the goalposts to 1994. Anyway, ENS has been available for five years (ethereum for seven, blockchain for 13). What businesses that are doing something other than sell their crypto project have an ENS domain?
You're accurate in that the plumber down the street, local dentist, bakery, etc likely didn't see the relevance of the web in 1994-1996. 13 years after bitcoin later I've been to maybe five of these types of businesses that take crypto or have anything to do with blockchain. 13 years after the release of the web there were over 85 million websites with a billion eyeballs.
Bitcoin didn't even show up on Google Trends until 2011. Two years after the web 9/10 of the top 10 Fortune 500 had a domain.
I'm doing my best to be respectful but how is this even a debate at this point?
1994 was just the only stat I could easily find, only trying to show the web was pretty small back then.
I don't think crypto is doing anything useful. It's been around long enough to have had important things (other than trading crypto tokens) built on it.
I just don't think most businesses saw the relevance of the internet in 1995, but it certainly grew fast and kept growing.
Not trying to be disrespectful, I just think we may be talking past each other a bit.
I think I generally agree: “most businesses” would include the guy who mows lawns or repairs shoes, but I think I would draw a divide for professional or especially technical services — they might not have been heavily online but I think they were starting to think that was becoming expected and if they did anything exchanging non-massive files there was a big time advantage to not paying FedEx or a courier to take floppies or CDs around town.
Heh. 1994 was when I helped convince the large technical service business I worked for that we should have an internet connection.
The big use case was downloading drivers and other things that previously had to posted on floppy disks, which often took weeks.
We also got web browsing, but there really wasn't much up there to begin with. You could play guess the domain name or find a few link listings on some pages. Altavista appeared pretty soon though.
Yeah, we take downloads for granted these days but FTP sure freed up a lot of waste time compared to filling floppies (remember people juggling how to pack them since each one cost enough money to add up?) and delivering them, or, later, having burn a new CD with updates for a handful of files.
Not only the guy who mows lawns or repairs shoes. Most small to medium non-technical organisations didn't use it. I did technical support for all kinds: hotels, publishing houses, printers, warehouses, charities... They were often installing leased ISDN lines to link their branches.
Definitely — I was mostly thinking of what the breakdown was for number of businesses versus the number of employees or sales volume. Starting around 1998, we had a client (spa.com) who was trying to build an online info & booking site for spas and you had a huge divide there with some spas being relatively large, stable operations where they had a T3 to a large facility with a ton of rooms and others being a 2 room operation out a dirt road in New Mexico with a maximum-length phone line barely capable of receiving faxes. On paper they both count as a business.
In contrast, we’re over a decade into the cryptocurrency push and the primary marketing hook is “buy now so you can sell it to someone else” with nothing anyone would miss if it disappeared. Unlike the internet, it’s been globally available to most of the world so you’d expect uptake to be faster rather than slower.