The dot com bubble was also much bigger than this current cryptocoin bubble. The market cap was bigger by multiples. I would also guess that this market cap reflected vastly more actual capital flowing into the market than we see now flowing into the “digital token” markets.

The prices are so easily manipulated on unregulated exchanges, coupled with other scams, means the nominal price can be moved with a lot less capital.

As a point of comparison, approx. 1MM people own Bitcoin, and I imagine that when you add in all the other cryptocurrencies it's not a whole lot larger.

In 1995, 40MM people had access to the internet.

The internet was a lot more established at the time of the Dotcom boom.

> Err, are you asking whether the internet was useful during/prior (and despite) the dot.com bubble?

Look, I was there from the mid 90s. I'm curious about the various viewpoints, as well as a more objective, less biased summary which attempts to ignore the nostalgia factor.

> Initially for information (e-mail, ftp, finger, usenet, gopher, WWW), later for commerce.

Thanks, OK, those are examples I can work with.

E-mail -> Still exists. Was it better back in those days? We had spam back then, right? Although not so much in the earlier parts of the 90s. FWIW, I did not have access to IMAP server. I had to use POP3 and webmail instead. Nor was IMAPS or POP3S used. Man, did POP3 and webmail sucked (until Gmail came along).

FTP -> Barely used anymore. Perhaps only in "the scene", though I know in the end of '00s that already happened via autoxfer bots. We got better, more secure means of data transfer though.

Usenet -> Still exists. Spammers largely moved on. Now and then two worlds: text and binary. One grew a lot, but a lot of smaller providers didn't grow with the insane data storage amounts. So a few big players nowadays. Same with ASPs (aka ISPs) in general for that matter. It has its + and - I guess.

Finger -> Replaced by blogs I guess?

Gopher -> Barely used anymore. Replaced by WWW. I didn't experience Gopher. My first browser was Netscape 2 <3

What about the more server/UNIX world? Was that better back then as well, with these large UNIX molochs like NeXT, SGI, HP, SUN, IBM, SCO?

Arguably though, the widespread adoption of TLS/SSL has made us more secure now than in the 90s. Back in those days, we did not have technologies like Tor.

> If you took away cryptocurrencies right now, impact on me and almost everyone I know would be basically nil. If you had taken away the internet in 1996, I and many other people would have complained.

I wasn't looking at it from that angle, I assumed the OP was comparing the internet of then with the internet of now; not comparing cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency is just a pleasure to observe for me, like rats running around in a cage. A bunch of NTs getting manipulated by a small number of psychopaths, that's how I'd sum cryptocurrency up.

Ah, my understanding was that OP was comparing utility of the internet then (at the time of the bubble) with crypto currencies now (at the time of the bubble, arguably).

I was.