Topic: Similarities to mass Bitcoin adoption beginning now & the internet in 1994. (Read 2627 times)

You are 100% correct.....

The Internet and Bitcoin were created to allow people to solve social problems in a novel way: Instead of the ancient formula of “the strongest wins and then beats the crap out of the loser” we all can achieve a peaceful society where both rich and poor, strong and weak can protect their property and freedom on more equal grounds without relying on violent institutions like governments.

Cypherpunk movement started as a mailing list in 1992.(Eric Hughes, Tim May, Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, Wei Dai, Adam Back, Ray Dillenger, etc…)

Here’s an excerpt from Cypherpunks FAQ:

2.3. “What’s the ‘Big Picture’?”

"Strong crypto is here. It is widely available. It implies many changes in the way the world works. Private channels between parties who have never met and who never will meet are possible. Totally anonymous, unsinkable, untraceable communications and exchanges are possible".

"Transactions can only be voluntary, since the parties are untraceable and unknown and can withdraw at any time. This has profound implications for the conventional approach of using the threat of force, directed against parties by governments or by others. In particular, threats of force will fail".

"What emerges from this is unclear, but I think it will be a form of anarcho-capitalist market system I call “crypto anarchy.” (Voluntary communications only, with no third parties butting in)".

*Tim May quote which explains why a system like Bitcoin would have to be created and launched open-sourced and anonymously.

Tim May: “Anyone contemplating building such a system, or entity, or cybercorporation, should think long and hard about the wisdom of ever having an identifiable nexus of attack. Money must be collected in untraceable ways. This is what I meant about it being time to rethink the theory of the corporation.”

"Where once a corporation existed to both protect the rights of shareholders (against lawsuits and partners having to pay for losses) and to enable the group participation of many workers, corporations for the things Cypherpunks think are interesting is just a bad idea. And given the growing trend toward trying to prosecute the V.P of Yahoo-Europe because some bit of Nazi history was sold to some German citizen, etc., corporations are becoming a liability in cyberspace”.

"The answer is to vanish into cyberspace. Not an easy task, maybe, given the state of today’s tools, but the long term trend".

Edit: I forgot to mention John Gilmore who has fought for our online freedom since the beginning of the internet. Without him standing up for us, we would have totally lost the battle.....
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_(activist)

nice.. btw i thought 56k modems came way after?? i remem my first 2400 baud was in pc xt days.. I would have thought 300 baud would be a premium on the vic20

Actually I still have the Vic20 and the modem...BBS worked great you did understand you had to buy a modem that plugged into the back of the Vic20 to access BBS? Here is a pic of the modem:
http://m.ebay.com/itm/like/191403387397?lpid=82

BTW, check out this Super Skillful 1986 programming:

10 print "Butterfly Labs Sucks"
20 goto 10

Insight on technology adoption...

http://www.slideshare.net/louadi/07-technology-adoption-life-cycle-2014

and..

http://www.lenvlahos.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/AdoptionCurve-crop.jpg


I'm not sure we're even into the "early adopter" phase yet really.

Thinking of all the tech I've witnessed adoption of over the last 3 decades, what comes closest to bitcoin, seems to me to be MP3s, and forget napster and iTunes for a moment, they are not the be-all and end-all of MP3 history....

I can't find particularly good references for this, going on what I remember. Geeks invented mp3 compression of audio circa 1995ish and saw that it was good. Storage and bandwidth was highly expensive, or less obtanium, and MP3s allowed a somewhere around twentyfold reduction in time required to download or space required to store audio. At first it was almost a pure geek thing, you had to find a player, spend hours on slowass Pentium MMX or so CPUs ripping and converting, or use search-foo skills on the internet (no google yet) to find any. Then as geeks found out how "good" this format was in terms of being able to put hundreds of songs on a HDD and have them play instantly, in whatever order you wanted, and not having to mess about with a stack of CDs, word began to spread and the more hip tech aware people were into this too.

Now the music industry were the incumbents here, the proverbial 800lb gorilla, and they were fully invested in physical media. By '97 or '98 the geeks and hip to tech were petitioning them, "Look how great this shit is, sell your stuff like this." and got a big fat "No way in hell, and by the way stop stealing our shit, we'll sue you if you so much as back up your own CDs." in return, no acknowlegment even that at the time it was equivalent to personal use mix tapes or anything, they just flat out denied the tech and started working to get it banned completely. By this time, the format was really starting to gain traction and a handful of the first hardware mp3 players were produced, I think that newly available cheaper lower power flash memory synergized with this, but it was doable, so it was done.

This is about where we've got to with bitcoin I think, banks are saying "No way, no how, should be illegal" and we've got the first crop of hardware wallets appearing whereas in the past you had to have a specialist program on your computer.

AFTER the above, the filesharing movement took off, practically in response to and in direct defiance of music industry stance on MP3s, it was a case of "Well fuck you then, we'll get them another way, we'll distribute them ourselves" piracy had always been around,, but now it was a more mainstream endeavor, there was a better value product than the music industry was offering, you could do more with it, it was more portable, you could transfer it faster. Here entereth Napster, who industrialised file sharing. Then the music industry began to fight seriously, they were not going to stand for this upstart. Napster was taken down finally, but 3 more filesharing systems had sprung up in the meantime, along with the decentralised bittorrent gaining popularity. Finally they began getting a clue that this might be a fight that they would have to give ground on somewhere... this laid the ground for the partnership with Apple and iTunes, (Others were Zune etc)

Anyway, in terms of how that analogy to bitcoin works, I think we are still pre-Napster right now, we've got that fight to come, then when we win that, the real mass adoption "iTunes" phase.

I would add that both internet and Bitcoin are decentralized technologies.
Maybe in the mid 90's people became bored with centralized media system, as well as now many people all over the world is fedding up of banks.

U could bbs with a vic20 even my commodor64 couldnt do that hmmmm?
Btw i had both

You can't think that way.
Buy as many as you can comfortably afford to now & HODL for upto 20 years.
It may be the best thing you ever do.

Interesting observations - I should have bought bitcoins when they were 8 dollars  - I might have missed the boom

We need things to be denominated in btc, not dollars.
until then, no btc economy is established.

In 1986 I had a Commodore Vic20 computer with a 56k phone modem. We used to dial up on bulletin boards(we were all local so it would not be long distance) and everyone said it was stupid and would not last, why would people type to each other on a computer when we could just talk on the phone. We were told by authorities we were tying up phone lines for important calls that need to be made and the government was sure illegal activities were going on. About 6 years later rumours came around that if we got a special computer and knew how to program, u could reach this world wide web that was forming. Immediately the accusations came about money laundering, drug dealing and inappropriate pictures so the government must regulate and monitor it with law enforcement. It even got to the point of the US wanting any website to be licensed by the FCC or it would not be allowed to be viewed in the US. A few years later the dial up internet took off and has developed into what we have today. It took about 15 years. I imagine Bitcoin will not take that long, but Bitcoin is still young and growing. If a person has not experienced an event like the internet coming to life, they may have trouble to see how Bitcoin is evolving right now.

1994 The Lincoln-Douglas debate was re-enacted.
2014 Former President George H. W. Bush was honored with the prestigious John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award™