They said:
> And that's in a space whose biggest ambition was to replace catalogue shopping and how hotel reservations are made.
Which is an amazingly uncharitable interpretation of "the whole tech industry" in the 90s when the internet was being created, ask people at the time to give their best-foot-forward description of ambitions and you'd probably get something much more like "make all the world's knowledge available to everyone" and "eliminate the tyranny of distance to let human relationships flourish"
Vs, you know, "replace banks and let people transfer money instantly" or "create a new currency" - which sounds an AWFUL lot like a subset of that "connect everything together" original tech goal. Hell, "create a new currency" was even a goal for a lot of players back then, too!
(Interestingly they both share a level of idealism in terms of transcending traditional national borders, whether or not that is practical/achievable/or was achieved fully.)
Ah yes, Flooz and Beenz. So silly, but at least they didn't use a small country's worth of electricity.
How long has Crypto remained a bottomless pit of fraud and greed?
GP is simply saying that making a permissionless financial network a key element of the way value is exchanged across the world is a much more ambitious goal than selling books online.