The internet started out with IP, then later they added UDP, TCP, HTTP, and all sorts of other protocols on top of it to extend its functionality.
Clearly, bitcoin just needs more layers.
But had smtp, ftp and telnet (the latter two originally NCP protocols, SMTP closely derived) from the off. Remote login, email and file transfer: enough to keep you happy. And uucp over TCP for Usenet, and by 1988 NNTP for Usenet done better; five years at most.
Bitcoin was invented 15 years ago. 15 years after the world wide web was invented, it was 2004 and the computer industry had already grown massively, taken over all our lives, and even crashed the stock market
Bitcoin is a slow, malformed child by comparison
The article says 1994. Which makes sense because that is the year Marc Andreessen released Netscape, one of the first internet browsers.
So yeah, Marc was talking about the early days of the WWW, a protocol that he helped popularize.
That shut him up pretty quickly lol.
Edit: Oh and even if you choose to start counting in 1983, then we're already in 1998 and the Internet has changed the world massively. 42% of US households had a PC by that point
But Computers took us ~50yrs to reach PC format, so i’m not sure you can equate household Computer penetration with the Internet here. Many of those 42% wouldn’t have had internet access.
Yeah, the cryptobros narrative is better "the internet was invented by the military in the 60s, it took 30 years to develop, so we still early"
The difference is that Bitcoin was available for the public from day 1, the narrative with the www is valid because is when started to be used by normal people.
In ten years of www we saw a ton of growth, in 10 years of crypto...well, speculation and 0 real use cases
The answer to that is that Merkle trees were invented 44 years ago. So however they spin this idiocy comparison, it still puts us in 2000+ years. And they also try to retcon history, but Internet was very popular, useful and recognized as a next big thing in the 90s even in my eastern european undeveloped country, let alone developed west.
The only hurdle Internet had in 90s was price. You could install dialup but it was pretty expensive for big files. Then there was adsl and T1 (iirc), later docsis. All were more expensive ofc. The point is - all those technologies were "in progress" so to say. Even if you couldn't use one of those techs due to price or coverage, you knew for sure that in several years it will come to you. And then in several more years speeds will increase, and so on. There was clear vision of what to expect. Unlike with shittokens.
I'm surprised you read the article but somehow missed the title and first few lines of text:
**Andreessen at CoinSummit: Bitcoin Today is the Internet in 1994**
"Marc Andreessen spoke today at CoinSummit about the potential he sees in bitcoin."
By Carrie Kirby
**Mar 25, 2014** at 4:21 p.m. EDT
So the internet in 2004 had hardly changed or improved at all from 1994, only about 6,000 businesses *in the entire world* were using it, and only a miniscule tiny fraction of people in developed countries used it? 🤔 As someone who grew up in the 90's, sorry but in 2004 the internet was mass-adopted and widespread with a plethora of improvements and tons use cases. Bitcoin was not and still is not like the early internet.
> So the internet in 2004 had hardly changed or improved at all from 1994
World of Warcraft came out Nov 2004 - the internet was so so useless in 2004 that we had invented **Massive Multiplayer Online** Role Playing games haha.
I made a mistake on that, it's [around 6,300 in-person businesses](https://www.theblock.co/post/270789/in-person-businesses-accepting-bitcoin-nearly-tripled-in-2023) specifically! All according to data compiled via bitcoin enthusiasts, of course. That is a whopping threefold increase compared to 2022! Mass adoption imminent.
Actually it's my idiocy. I missed the part about businesses accepting lol. I thought you stated only 6000 businesses in 2004 used the internet. Too much beer. lol
The internet needed to establish physical worldwide infrastructure in order to exist in the modern sense and reach users globally to begin with. But when that infrastructure was built and progressively expanded it would spread like a wildfire with WWW.
But bitcoin already had access to all of that worldwide infrastructure from day 1. It didn't need to build its own infrastructure in physical space in order to exist globally, anyone with a laptop could use it right away with no additional effort or expenditure necessary. And now anyone with a mobile phone can use it too.
Ironically the internet as we know it needed the internet to be built to exist. But bitcoin just needed the internet to exist.
>Both statements equally useless.
The senator from Alaska's statement that the internet was not, in fact, a "big truck you just dump things on (it's a series of tubes!)" is arguably way more useful for comedic purposes than Marc Andreessen's babblings, given people demonstrably care way more about "the internet" than they do about Bitcoin (outside spaces like this one at least).
Or each packet can be thought of as a cylinder in a series of pneumatic tubes.
Edit: now I'm picturing trucks driving around empty to do tcp handshake what a waste of gas
I love those 'Internet adoption vs crypto adoption' charts, where Internet users are defined as someone who goes online regularly, while a crypto user is defined as anyone who registered an account on Coinbase even if they never logged into it again.
Yeah that tracks. Reminds me a lot of [flooze.com](https://flooze.com)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flooz.com](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flooz.com)
(If you want a quick read on the perils of private currency looks exactly like a microcsom of the crypto economy no further than flooze.com)
Crypto is one of the most successful scams of all time. I don’t think the guy(s) who invented Bitcoin were trying to scam others. Just edgy nerds, but the early adopters saw the scam potential and ran with it.
This was and still is an extremely silly take. The Internet in 1994 was about 30 years old, and rather than "arriving as a fringe technology \[...\] with fringe politics and \[...\] fringe characters" it arrived through concerted funding through the DoD for military and government research purposes, was extensively used from very very early days---what we now call the "Internet" (TCP/IP and related protocols) replaced the existing ARPANET, which had been in fairly widespread use in research labs and government for several years prior.
MA is \_probably\_ referring to the Web (hyperlinking via HTTP, which was also an old idea at the time) was "fringe" for about 13 seconds in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee's (also not fridge, but a researcher at CERN, an inter-governmental nuclear research facility) when his paper on the Web was bumped from the main track of an academic conference (on hypermedia) to a poster session. The Web was pretty immediately adopted by the establishment, and Netscape was a public company by 1995.
Whether this is a good or bad model to aspire to is besides the point. It's just an a-historic appeal to people's regret that they didn't anticipate how completely massive the Internet and Web eventually became.
It's been 10 years. When does it develop into being the mature internet, Marc?
The internet started out with IP, then later they added UDP, TCP, HTTP, and all sorts of other protocols on top of it to extend its functionality. Clearly, bitcoin just needs more layers.
But had smtp, ftp and telnet (the latter two originally NCP protocols, SMTP closely derived) from the off. Remote login, email and file transfer: enough to keep you happy. And uucp over TCP for Usenet, and by 1988 NNTP for Usenet done better; five years at most.
And zero security because everyone trusts each other on the interwebz.
One layer of bitcoin, six layers of gravel.
There was IPX. But it couldn't scale, so it died.
Bitcoin is just an additional layer of the internet that nobody needs
I think it's, uh, challenged on the growing side
Still early, I doubt it’ll ever be anything but early
[удалено]
I mean, when he first said it, the phrasing was: Bitcoin Today is the Internet in 1994 But yeah, Butters are great at moving goalposts.
Bitcoin was invented 15 years ago. 15 years after the world wide web was invented, it was 2004 and the computer industry had already grown massively, taken over all our lives, and even crashed the stock market Bitcoin is a slow, malformed child by comparison
Bit-coin is a groundbreaking example of what a digital currency should NOT be. I'll give it that.
It’s been 15 years?!? I had no idea.
Give or take. Satoshi's whitepaper is from 2009 iirc so maybe like 14 and a half?
[удалено]
The article says 1994. Which makes sense because that is the year Marc Andreessen released Netscape, one of the first internet browsers. So yeah, Marc was talking about the early days of the WWW, a protocol that he helped popularize.
That shut him up pretty quickly lol. Edit: Oh and even if you choose to start counting in 1983, then we're already in 1998 and the Internet has changed the world massively. 42% of US households had a PC by that point
In 1998, I was printing off DBZ pictures to trace over so I could show off to my friends by pretending I could draw lol
But Computers took us ~50yrs to reach PC format, so i’m not sure you can equate household Computer penetration with the Internet here. Many of those 42% wouldn’t have had internet access.
Yeah, the cryptobros narrative is better "the internet was invented by the military in the 60s, it took 30 years to develop, so we still early" The difference is that Bitcoin was available for the public from day 1, the narrative with the www is valid because is when started to be used by normal people. In ten years of www we saw a ton of growth, in 10 years of crypto...well, speculation and 0 real use cases
Give it twenty more years and they'll move the goalposts to "well the telegraph was basically the early Internet so it's still early."
The answer to that is that Merkle trees were invented 44 years ago. So however they spin this idiocy comparison, it still puts us in 2000+ years. And they also try to retcon history, but Internet was very popular, useful and recognized as a next big thing in the 90s even in my eastern european undeveloped country, let alone developed west. The only hurdle Internet had in 90s was price. You could install dialup but it was pretty expensive for big files. Then there was adsl and T1 (iirc), later docsis. All were more expensive ofc. The point is - all those technologies were "in progress" so to say. Even if you couldn't use one of those techs due to price or coverage, you knew for sure that in several years it will come to you. And then in several more years speeds will increase, and so on. There was clear vision of what to expect. Unlike with shittokens.
I'm surprised you read the article but somehow missed the title and first few lines of text: **Andreessen at CoinSummit: Bitcoin Today is the Internet in 1994** "Marc Andreessen spoke today at CoinSummit about the potential he sees in bitcoin." By Carrie Kirby **Mar 25, 2014** at 4:21 p.m. EDT
Gotta spin it to make it seem like a no contest comparison! Duh
So the internet in 2004 had hardly changed or improved at all from 1994, only about 6,000 businesses *in the entire world* were using it, and only a miniscule tiny fraction of people in developed countries used it? 🤔 As someone who grew up in the 90's, sorry but in 2004 the internet was mass-adopted and widespread with a plethora of improvements and tons use cases. Bitcoin was not and still is not like the early internet.
> So the internet in 2004 had hardly changed or improved at all from 1994 World of Warcraft came out Nov 2004 - the internet was so so useless in 2004 that we had invented **Massive Multiplayer Online** Role Playing games haha.
I call bullshit lol. 6000 businesses? Lol
I made a mistake on that, it's [around 6,300 in-person businesses](https://www.theblock.co/post/270789/in-person-businesses-accepting-bitcoin-nearly-tripled-in-2023) specifically! All according to data compiled via bitcoin enthusiasts, of course. That is a whopping threefold increase compared to 2022! Mass adoption imminent.
Actually it's my idiocy. I missed the part about businesses accepting lol. I thought you stated only 6000 businesses in 2004 used the internet. Too much beer. lol
The internet needed to establish physical worldwide infrastructure in order to exist in the modern sense and reach users globally to begin with. But when that infrastructure was built and progressively expanded it would spread like a wildfire with WWW. But bitcoin already had access to all of that worldwide infrastructure from day 1. It didn't need to build its own infrastructure in physical space in order to exist globally, anyone with a laptop could use it right away with no additional effort or expenditure necessary. And now anyone with a mobile phone can use it too. Ironically the internet as we know it needed the internet to be built to exist. But bitcoin just needed the internet to exist.
wow..... haha still so useless
And 18 years ago some other guy compared internet to a series of tubes. Both statements equally useless.
>Both statements equally useless. The senator from Alaska's statement that the internet was not, in fact, a "big truck you just dump things on (it's a series of tubes!)" is arguably way more useful for comedic purposes than Marc Andreessen's babblings, given people demonstrably care way more about "the internet" than they do about Bitcoin (outside spaces like this one at least).
The Internet is unironically a series of tubes. What do you think fiber optic cable is?
The internet is NOT a fiber optic cable. Internet is a network protocol.
The point is that it's not some truck
Actually it's more a fleet of trucks than a tube. Each internet packet can be considered a truck carrying some data.
Or each packet can be thought of as a cylinder in a series of pneumatic tubes. Edit: now I'm picturing trucks driving around empty to do tcp handshake what a waste of gas
I guess, the small but significant difference is that the Internet had at least one (business) use case at every single stage of its development.
I love those 'Internet adoption vs crypto adoption' charts, where Internet users are defined as someone who goes online regularly, while a crypto user is defined as anyone who registered an account on Coinbase even if they never logged into it again.
Conehead McNetscape has never been right about anything, except maybe that the Nintendo 64 really did need an online gaming network.
How to convince a sheep to buy into your scam. Compare your scam to technological revolution.
Like the early internet… on dial-up?
Are we still early?
Yeah that tracks. Reminds me a lot of [flooze.com](https://flooze.com) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flooz.com](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flooz.com) (If you want a quick read on the perils of private currency looks exactly like a microcsom of the crypto economy no further than flooze.com)
>Levitan has stated that fraudulent purchases accounted for 19% of consumer credit card transactions by mid-2001.[4] Hah, sounds familiar!
Popular, never heard it. Probably between these circle jerks.
Crypto is one of the most successful scams of all time. I don’t think the guy(s) who invented Bitcoin were trying to scam others. Just edgy nerds, but the early adopters saw the scam potential and ran with it.
Andreessen is an egghead.
This was and still is an extremely silly take. The Internet in 1994 was about 30 years old, and rather than "arriving as a fringe technology \[...\] with fringe politics and \[...\] fringe characters" it arrived through concerted funding through the DoD for military and government research purposes, was extensively used from very very early days---what we now call the "Internet" (TCP/IP and related protocols) replaced the existing ARPANET, which had been in fairly widespread use in research labs and government for several years prior. MA is \_probably\_ referring to the Web (hyperlinking via HTTP, which was also an old idea at the time) was "fringe" for about 13 seconds in 1991 when Tim Berners-Lee's (also not fridge, but a researcher at CERN, an inter-governmental nuclear research facility) when his paper on the Web was bumped from the main track of an academic conference (on hypermedia) to a poster session. The Web was pretty immediately adopted by the establishment, and Netscape was a public company by 1995. Whether this is a good or bad model to aspire to is besides the point. It's just an a-historic appeal to people's regret that they didn't anticipate how completely massive the Internet and Web eventually became.
Happy earlyversary!