The web was developed for a long time before 1996. I'd wager cryptocurrency has another 8 years before it's mainstream.

I thought the Internet had gone mainstream in 1992 when I was passed by a UPS truck with their URL painted on the side..

Are you sure it was 1992?

Wikipedia says that there were only 50 web servers in the world in January 1993, and my recollection is that were all at educational and research institutions. I don't think for example that any of the major computer companies, e.g., Microsoft or Apple, had web site that early. (They had internet connectivity, domain names, mail servers, ftp servers -- but back then, ftp servers did not have URLs.) Maybe one or 2 had web servers, but if they did, they were probably the personal projects of one or two employees.

Most of the world's web pages were about computers and the internet.

Yes. It was something of a surprise at the time. It was also in the UK, on the A1. I know the year because it was shortly after I started a specific job that required driving up and down the A1 often. It would have been late in the year because I think I started that job in November.

Here is the registered date from whois for ups.com :

Created Date: 1992-04-07

I think you (or Wikipedia) are quite mistaken about 50 web servers in early 1993. I remember giving a talk about the Internet in 93 where I showed examples of web sites that were available at the time. One of them was IMDB. If I think of the servers that I ran and my friends ran, I'd get to about 20 so I have a very hard time believing there were only 50 in total. Perhaps there was a huge amount of server growth during 1993?

Yeah, 1992 is way too early for that. Even then, it wasn't fully mainstream until advertisers felt able to drop the http://www from the url. When companies could just put coke.com at the end of their TV ads or on the can, it was as mainstream as anything.

As I said above it was a surprise to me at the time, but nevertheless true. The domain was registered in April 1992.

I don't know.

The Web and Bitcoin are operating on different time scales. One of the major factors with the Web's speed of success was that it was able to disrupt traditional media industries because it wasn't recognized as a threat until it was too late.

I don't think the Finance industry is going to let the same thing happen with Bitcoin, hence things like R3 and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.

Ask your parents to explain cryptocurrency. It's not about wall clock time. It's about milestones.

My point isn't "it's been eight years, so it must be ready", it's "it's been eight years, so you can stop comparing it to the early internet now".

I've been following Bitcoin for five years now, and I've seen this "it's the early Internet, success doesn't happen overnight" attitude that gets more and more false every year.

Bitcoin and the ecosystem around has barely changed since it was released.

> Bitcoin and the ecosystem around has barely changed since it was released.

And yet it's still going, and with all the turmoil, it hasn't been fundamentally broken yet.

I think in the end, if it remains unbroken (that is, no 50% attacks, etc) bitcoin will become a backing currency for more flexible/faster/easier to use/understand approaches. I think it has a future, but I'm not sure its future is "My mom understands it." It may nonetheless remain useful, and thus, continue to have value, even if itself it never goes "mainstream".

Already it is seeing over the last 2 years a stability in its price that is very comforting. The main criticism is its extreme volatility, but as it is adopted more, as its price goes up, and as more inertia is inserted into the market, it should stabilize even more and cause a positive feedback loop encouraging more adoption. It's doesn't need to be used for day-to-day transactions for it to have value, I think it's already proven that point imho.

The main concern is that this could literally turn around overnight if ever it gets fundamentally hacked/broken. This is always going to be a risk, an uncertainty which might hurt it in the long run. The question is, is this worse than e.g. counterfeit concerns with fiat currency.

TCP/IP started going global in the mid-1980s. If you consider Bitcoin to be just the first working example of a digital currency protocol, then a better analogy might even be the first packet switching protocols in the 1960s.

Bitcoin has barely changed, but the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a whole has changed massively, and shows no sign of stopping.

If you're like 25, I could be your parent. And I understand cryptocurrency OK, so I guess make sure you have dumb parents before trying this test.

But actually the difficulty of understanding it is a big part of what keeps it from going truly mainstream. When the equivalent of AOL comes along and abstracts all that stuff away for people, that's when you'll see Eternal September all over again.

Do you think hotbot launched on day 1 of the web?