Topic: Bitcoin vs Internet adoption. Bill Gates was trolled about Internet in 1995 (Read 177 times)

We had this before the internet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system

True, but not for commodity products. As far as a consumer or vendor is concerned, a transaction is a transaction. The only thing that makes them different is speed and cost.

You don't necessarily have to be cheaper to succeed, though it is necessary to capture the widest possible audience. But even expensive things can be successful if there's demand for them, due to some other property compensating for the high price.


And this is the big reason why people aren't switching to Bitcoin - banks work quite well for them, so there's no incentive to change anything.

Unfortunately, cryptocurrency at large isn’t Bitcoin. The chart speaks of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin is just one of the many cryptocurrencies that are out there (though it’s the most popular and the first). I’ve said before that the creating of Altcoins are somewhat a distraction for Bitcoin. For example, I think that Bitcoin value will be a lot more if only it was the only cryptocurrency. Because it will be the only investment when anyone talks about Cryptocurrency. However, I know that Bitcoin has mountains to climb. We may be at the top of a mountain already but there’s more. Many more ATH will happen.

1. Bitcoin is used as an investment/store of value already, all over the world. What more do you want from governments that they are not already doing?

2. Today you can have a Bitcoin account, transfer funds to a USD account to fund a credit card payment, and you could easily do all of this in real time to the point where it would be effectively no different than paying in Bitcoin. Millions of people do this all of the time, every day, when they visit foreign countries and draw on their home credit card.

Bitcoin is still in its 90's-internet era. Internet was promising but it wasn't until the 2000s that the internet took off with marketplaces like Amazon, search like Google, and social media like Facebook. Bitcoin is still in its early era like the internet was in the 90s.

For Bitcoin the big things (like marketplaces/search/social media for the internet) are going to be (1) govts and financial markets normalizing it as an investment/store of value and then (2) L2 solutions spreading and major merchants adding bitcoin as a payment option using L2.

The first thing may or may not get started very soon if ETFs get approved, and in the US now starting in 2025 their will be fair accounting rules for corporate ownership of Bitcoin which is another step toward the first thing I mentioned. After that we're still going to need the major govts of the world to put forth common sense regulations and safeguards for the industry to normalize it for the masses and make people stop thinking its some weird internet scam.

The second thing is gonna be on a much longer timeframe because unlike the internet its unlikely a single startup is going to suddenly bring in hundreds of millions of people to using bitcoin for purchases like how amazon, google, and facebook popularized their respective major use cases of the internet. For Bitcoin to become a major payment options is going to require lots of merchants both online and brick and mortar to start accepting Bitcoin. But before that we need LN to be further developed and ideally other competing L2's to be developed and mature.

So while Bitcoin's huge investment potential has so far kept it up with internet adoption in the early days, and through the rest of this decade it may continue to roughly keep up with internet adoption as the things in my #1 above happen, #2 (payments) is going to likely take a lot more than the decade it took the internet to go from experimenting with use cases to having taken over the world with some of its major use cases. I expect we'll see Bitcoin fall off the internet's adoption pace next decade as Bitcoin has to go through the hard slow work of going from a currency to save in, which doesn't require anything beyond being able to buy/sell/own it, to being an actual widely adopted payment option which requires a immensely more growth of the ecosystem.

Indeed, for any new technology to break into a new market, you actually have to be even cheaper and even better than the entrenched competition.

Bitcoin isn't even within 10,000x on transaction speed and cost. Some other cryptos are marginally better, but they are still 1000x off the mark.

The blockchain architecture will never allow cryptocurrencies to get anywhere close to what they'd need to be to compete.

The great news is that none of this matters since people love to use cryptos as speculation instruments. Crypto prices have never been tied to wide adoption as a payment mechanism, and never will.

This is where Internet distinguishes. There wasn't an alternative to the Internet back in the 90s, just as there wasn't an alternative to electricity. I'm very supportive, but truth be told, Bitcoin is mostly money; and history is full of money alternatives. The bet is that these particular properties, like denationalization and state separation of monetary policy will distinguish on the long term.

(By "bet", I mean the best case scenario for bitcoin. Losing that bet does not mean it stops being peer-to-peer electronic cash.)

It may sound like the stupid masses were refusing to see Internets potential, but what actually happened is that the Internet was prohibitively expensive, the monthly subscription costed like $500 or $1,000 per month, which was way more in today's money; and the Internet was slow and not as full of organized content as it is today. If the Internet never progressed and stayed at that state, it would be very popular today.

So the actual analogy with Bitcoin is that Bitcoin won't get mass adoption unless transactions because nearly instant and with zero fees. Like what banks offer today.

This proves the saying that History always repeats itself. whatever happened with the Internet is happened with Bitcoin.
I don't think it is right to compare early days of internet with the current time of bitcoin. but yeah Bitcoin also faced the same type of rejection and was trolled by many people in its early days.

But I don't agree that Bitcoin can make bigger impact than Internet. Internet is a very very huge thing. Bitcoin is built on internet and running with the help of internet. they are completely different things. regardless of that they are both great invention.

The similarities between the early days of the Internet and Bitcoin are quite staggering. It’s almost comical looking back at both now that they have become so commonplace. While the internet may be a little more commonly used and understood, there is no doubt in my mind that Bitcoin will continue to follow the same growth path.

i agree with you that when bill gates first said that the internet would be booming in the next few years, people laughed at him, but seeing how the internet has become big now and almost all humans are dependent on it shows that how much the internet was underestimated at first has become very important now.

and that might happen to bitcoin, where many people underestimated it at first and thought that it was just an ordinary digital asset and would disappear in some time, but now it is big and will likely grow even more.

even though it is unstable for now, and people tend to see it as just a speculative asset, in the future it will probably be a digital asset that is traded and transacted by many people globally far more than now.

What "bigness" are they supposed to grasp?

Also, what evidence do you have that Bitcoin adoption has increased over say the past few years? In another thread I asked the question about how we would know this, and most agreed that Bitcoin's structure makes it impossible to know how many people are using it, and what the trend is over time. Adoption could have gone down over the last year for all we know.

And Bitcoin "adoption" is limited to people holding it as a speculation instrument, so there's nothing inherently permanent about this adoption in any case.

First of all, as much as I love Bitcoin and I want it to always grow, I highly doubt this. The potential of the internet cannot be estimated. We've not even used half the potential of the internet.
Without Bitcoin, there will be the Internet, but without the Internet, there would be no Bitcoin. The impact of the internet would be felt in everything in every part of the world including Bitcoin.

Secondly, the reports of new papers (big or small) cannot be always relied on. Not every of their news should be believed.
It is expected that a newspaper should be against the internet because they fear it will put them out of business.  So if they say (millions of people are abandoning the internet), it may not not be completely true.

That's because those people are too pragmatic to be able to grasp the idea that there's something big out there and that's just a normal thinking that someone's always disproven of their claims that this is the limit of something. Of course there's a bunch that's just don't have the belief but they don't matter in the grand scheme of things. I don't think it's going to go down in the future or break the floor it's created over the years, it will only go up because bitcoin adoption is a constant thing.

I have to agree with this, and I think I've already written it several times in similar topics - I think it's wrong to compare Bitcoin with the internet, even if it's an argument for some when it comes to putting in context the time it took for the internet to become something accessible to most people, with the same thing when it comes to Bitcoin.

I sincerely doubt that people will ever accept Bitcoin (especially as a currency) given that most governments in the world will never put Bitcoin ahead of their national currencies. If we exclude some countries with totalitarian-communist regimes, most of the free world has accepted the internet as something positive.

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It should not be forgotten that Gavin was one of those who in some way "protested" because of the way Satoshi made decisions and actually "demanded" to take over the matter. In those early days, Satoshi was not a favorite person and regardless of the reasons, he left because he no longer felt comfortable.

Besides, glorifying Gavin shouldn't be a one way street, this is the same guy who believed that CW Faketoshi was the real Satoshi. For someone who is supposedly very well versed in Bitcoin matters, it's really strange that he would fall for such a cheap trick.

I liked the video, I haven't seen it before.
The history of adoption of the Internet is interesting because it really was slow, and it did seem like it wasn't going to become a huge worldwide thing that it became. Bitcoin is revolutionary in the area of finance, and I think it might still gain a lot more attention and adoption than it currently has. But there are also fundamental problems like the number of transactions the network can handle per second, and the fees that rise when too many transactions are waiting for confirmation. Also, PCs and the Internet were way more universal than Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a currency, and while blockchain is a fairly universal underlying technology, it didn't become a major success in areas other than cryptos. So while there's hope and there are similarities, there are also major differences.

Whilst I only think that these ETFs are significant because one is made actually for Bitcoin. But after analyzing and realizing why many people are having a different reaction than of those the ICO times, NFT days and meme coin craze. This is definitely like once in a lifetime moment for the entire community and Bitcoin itself. So with this reference, gold didn't have an etf but when it does, this what happened on it.




How much it will be with Bitcoin?  
Plus halving.

Comparing cryptocurrencies and the Internet is unreasonable because they differ in many basics. Comparing the Internet with something as centralized as CBDCs, not Bitcoin, which aims to be P2P E-money.
The Internet provides infrastructure, and the importance of the Internet comes from the importance of the applications that run on it, which is different for Bitcoin, whose value comes from Bitcoin in its entirety, in addition to additional value that comes from building on top of the Bitcoin network.
using the Internet may not be expensive, as each megabyte in the blockchain is very expensive.

The world first Bitcoin conference
Gavin Andresen talked about his opinion on Bitcoin Priorities. About this man, newbies can learn more about his contributions.

• Satoshi files: Gavin Andresen
• He run the first Bitcoin faucet
  
  • Get 5 free bitcoins from freebitcoins.appspot.com
  • http://web.archive.org/web/20100703032414/http://freebitcoins.appspot.com/
• He took over Bitcoin development after Satoshi's message that the founder will leave and move to other things soon.
• Gavin will visit the CIA to talk about Bitcoin

It is another good evidence of Bitcoin adoption over years. It has been grown very exponentially within 15 years since 2009.