Toys, Secrets, and Cycles: Lessons from the 2000s
I’ve seen these takes and I can never get a simple answer to a simple question:<p>“Where are the users?”<p>By the 2001 timeframe he’s describing the internet had roughly 500 million users worldwide. I think his descriptions of how most people used and viewed the internet are revisionist history and self serving for criticisms such as the one I’m starting on but the fact remains - half a billion people with a daily average of 30 min.<p>Let’s look at what it took to get the first half billion on line (starting from 1988):<p>- You had to buy a computer or device that was capable of accessing the internet. Let’s be very conservative and say this is $1000 (non inflation adjusted). You spent this money knowing the computer would be obsolete and nearly worthless in 1-2 years.<p>- In many cases dialup was long distance and pay by the minute by the telephone company and ISP. I know it was for me and my family until about 1996 or so. We used it 30 minutes a day because it was double billed by the minute and ridiculously expensive.<p>- Dial up providers had to deploy massive hardware infrastructure - hundreds of thousands if not millions of modem banks to telephone exchanges throughout the entire country.<p>- “Backbone providers” had to dig trenches, lay fiber, and dispatch ships to lay fiber across oceans.<p>- Telephone companies and a variety of other infrastructure providers had to upgrade, repair, etc untold miles of existing copper infrastructure, switches, etc, etc<p>The first transatlantic telephone cable to use fiber optics was activated in 1988. 1988 to the 2001 period he describes is 13 years.<p>Bitcoin was released 13 years ago. From an exhaustive analysis I’ve done over the top 20 Coindesk blockchains at best there are MAYBE 100 million users of anything blockchain related worldwide.<p>As cdixon mentions in the article in 2009 we had the iPhone and App Store. We had Android. The internet had roughly 2 billion users. Ubiquitous broadband, social media, cellular data, etc, etc.<p>Getting a user on to the internet (and supporting them) in the 13 year period between 1988 and 2001 was a tremendous challenge.<p>Getting a bitcoin&#x2F;blockchain user online (and supporting them) for its entire existence is downloading an application on your phone or computer. For the bast majority of blockchains history I could make someone a bitcoin user in five minutes or less in a bar. Or even simpler - they could click a link on a social media post from one of their 500 connections.<p>Remember the $1000 guaranteed to depreciate computer to get on the internet from the 90s? With bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies the other half of the so called value prop is that it’s virtually guaranteed to “moon” and make you 100x (or whatever).<p>Yet blockchain user adoption has grown at 1&#x2F;5 the rate of the web&#x2F;internet - and this is being very generous to blockchain.<p>People saw value and utility in the internet and the rate of user adoption reflects that.<p>I can’t get anyone to answer my simple question:<p>“Where are the users?”<p>As we’ve seen with every technology invention of all time if it provides value, utility, quality of life improvements, etc people figure it out and will adopt it - even if it involves jumping through the kinds of hoops, expense, etc we did in the 90s for the internet.<p>That clearly and plainly isn’t happening with anything related to blockchain.<p>Why?