In 1987, Usenet and email were already pretty great. (And that was all before the web!)

Also things like FTP and telnet had many applications, too. My grandfather is an electrical engineer and he talked about how cool it was that the company he worked for got online in the 1980s because it allowed them to get things like Fortran compiler updates or numerical libraries without having to wait for them to be shipped on floppies. My uncle used online services for his food industry business, stock trading, etc. then too.

In early 1987 the number of hosts passes 10,000 [1] Space Quest - The Sarien Encounter was released in October 1986 [2] Only in 1989 Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and the United Kingdom join the Internet.

[1] https://www.computerhistory.org/internethistory/1980s/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Quest_I

Also one year later IRC was invented.

Killer app if ever there was one.

…and it was clearly adding value all over the place.

It wasn’t on the growth curve post-1992, but its value for technology companies and universities was not even a question.

People will look back at 2020 Blockchain and say it was also adding value all over the place. Decentralized storage exists, decentralized DNS exists, NFTs exist, remittances exist, and so on.

Is the value marginal next to what the web does today? Sure. But its more than enough value for people 50 years from now to get rose tinted glasses around, as many are doing in this thread concerning the early internet

People will look back at 2020 Blockchain and either say (a) crap, how did we ever get taken in by that, or (b) boy, howdy, do you remember how foolish those people were that thought this stuff was anything but a scam?

There is nothing that can be done on blockchain that cannot be done cheaper, faster, easier, and more securely without blockchain. Blockchain has negative value, and no matter where you measure the start of the Internet from, it had more positive externalities fourteen years on than anything blockchain will ever have, not least because so-called "blockchain" has an insurmountable set of negative externalities that would need to be overcome if a single real-world productive use could be found for it.

Having heard this argument a nauseating number of times, it's fairly clear that people on both sides who say this use "the internet" when they mean "the web." So 1999 is a better "after 10 years'" benchmark here.

The web was the killer app built on the infrastructure of the internet. The blockchain ecosystem is still building it's infrastructure.

# 1970s: The Internet (US Research Institutions, ARPA, IETF, IEEE,)

TCP/IP, DNS (/etc/hosts), Routing Protocols for multiple DUN (Dial-Up Networking) links between schools, Gopher

# The Web (TimBL (@CERN), IETF, W3C)

HTTP, HTML: "Hyperlinks" between "Hypertext" documents; edges with "anchor text" types.

[No-crypto P2P]

# Web 2.0 (CoC Web Frameworks, AJAX, open source SQL, LAMP,)

Interactive HTML with user-contributed-content to moderate

# ~~Web 3.0~~ (W3C,)

Linked Data; RDF, RDFa

5-Star Linked Data: https://5stardata.info/

- Use URIs in your datasets; e.g. describe the columns of the CSVs with URIs: CSVW

# Web3 ("Zero-Trust")

SK: Secret Key

PK: Public Key

Crypto P2P: resilient distributed system application architectures with no points of failure

ENS (Ethereum Name Service) instead of DNS. ENS binds unique strings to accounts; just like NFTs.

(A non-fungible-token is a like a coin where each bill has a unique serial number. A fungible-token is a thing that there are transactable fractions of that needn't have unique identities: US coinage, barrels of oil, ounces of gold/silver. Non-fungible tokens are indivisible: you can't tear a bill in half because there's only the one serial number (and that's actually a federal crime in the USA, to deface money). Similarly, ENS entries - which map a string to an account id (hash of a public key) - can't be split into fractions and sold, so they're Non-FTs; NFTs)

(DNS is somewhat unfixably broken due to the permissiveness necessary to interact with non-DNSSEC-compliant domains resulting in downgrade attack risks: even with e.g. DNS-over-TLS, DNS-over-HTTPS, or DNS-over-QUIC securing the channel; if the DNS client does not reject DNS responses that do not have DNSSEC signatures, a DNS MITM will succeed. If you deny access to DNSSEC-unsigned domains at your DNS client config or the (maybe forwarding) DNS resolver on the router, what is the error message in the browser?)

But it also probably isn't a great to compare Bitcoin to "the web." I'm not really aware of some prototype Bitcoin that had large scale and 30 years of development.

I'm also not sure why "the technology is in its infancy and doesn't give us great indications at if it is usable in the real world, but right now is full of scammers and fraud" isn't an acceptable position. Why does it have to either be the next great new thing or a grift? People grifting with new technology and taking advantage of the tech illiterate is pretty common.

Exactly, so then lightning is the better comparison, since it just a few years old and built on bitcoin, like the web was bult on tcp/ip.

What event you are counting from? The term "internet" was first used in 1974 (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc675) AFAIK, but the technology has been in development since 1960s.

But Al Gore didn't even take office until 1992.

Al Gore was first elected to congress in 1977.

That's why he had time to invent the internet! You can't do that while being busy with congressing and stuff.