Is Crypto The New Internet?

If someone told you today that “The internet is just a fad” you would probably laugh at them. That would be the most reasonable response after all. The internet in its modern form has been around for over 30 years. Year after year, it seems to creep further into our lives becoming a more essential facet of them. We read news, watch TV, and chat with friends all online. Almost everything we do has some aspect of it involved with the internet. So, it makes it easy to forget that this wasn’t always the case.

For most of the 1990s, the internet was not much more than a niche tool used by the technically savvy. It would have been somewhat reasonable to think the internet was just a passing trend. However, that changed throughout the decade. As the internet and technology surrounding it evolved, it became more accessible and useful in daily life, eventually growing to what we know it as today.

Crypto and blockchain technology as a whole could be going through the same adoption that the internet experienced in the ’90s. There are quite a few similarities between the two technologies: they both started very niche, have drawn a lot of critics, and have seen ridiculous amounts of exponential growth. Is crypto really mimicking the growth of the early internet or is this just wishful thinking?

In 1990 less than 1% of the United States population was using the internet, but by the year 2000, roughly 43% of all Americans were online. That means a large portion of the population ended the decade using a technology that barely even existed at its start. Compare this with crypto in the last 10 years.

In the early 2010s you would have struggled to find anyone who had heard of Bitcoin, much less have them know what it actually is. Fast forward to 2022. Bitcoin, crypto, and blockchain technology are all terms that a lot of people have at least heard of. If you ask what Bitcoin is many people will even know that it’s a digital currency.

Recent studies show that, as of 2021, 16% of the United States population has invested in, traded, or used cryptocurrencies. Compare that to only 1% of the United States population using the largest cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, in 2015. This is a pretty massive shift considering Bitcoin made up around 90% of the crypto market at the time.

Crypto as a whole is still a long way from the domination that the internet had by the year 2000. The 90s era of the internet definitely lines up more closely with what we are seeing in the crypto space today. In 2000 and the years following it was much clearer that the internet was taking off. But several years prior many would be much more skeptical of the technology’s success.

Crypto has grown a lot over the last several years and this has attracted many skeptics to the space. They often believe that crypto is a fad or scam. It’s not unexpected. Any technology that becomes prominent very quickly is undoubtedly going to have some resistance, especially something as revolutionary as crypto or the internet. When these technologies first start to catch on, they have a lot of room left to grow. This leaves many doubting if the technology could ever evolve to the great heights many early adopters envision.

Take Clifford Stoll for example. He was an avid computer user back in the 90s but couldn’t see the internet as being much more than what it was at the time.

In 1995 he wrote exactly on this subject to Newsweek.

“ Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”

Reading this quote over 25 years later it almost seems like satire. Not only were his predictions inaccurate, but they are close to the exact opposite of what actually transpired. Most news is consumed online, lessons are often pre-recorded or taught over zoom, and our current government has adopted the internet into almost every facet of its existence. The internet undoubtedly rules our lives in ways that few could have guessed back in the 90s. Far from fringe, Clifford Stoll’s ideas were accepted by many at the time.

While the internet was breaking many new barriers in the 90s, the technology just wasn’t there yet. The internet was young and immature. Lots of fantastic ideas were starting to surface. You could send an email to a friend or read something on a static webpage, but much more wasn’t possible. Something like Facebook or YouTube would have been completely impractical at the time. It would take a decade for the technology to catch up to those more advanced ideas and even longer to see them morph into what they are today.

The early stages of adoption are a time when it’s very hard to understand a new technology. A new and revolutionary concept requires a lot of learning to truly grasp. If no one is familiar with this new advancement, how are they supposed to understand it in a quick and meaningful way? This becomes much easier once the technology evolves and becomes a part of people’s daily lives.

For these reasons the process of actually explaining what crypto is and how it works isn’t an easy one. You need to explain not only the technical aspects of it but also the conceptual ones. For example, most people have no clue that Bitcoin is decentralized or what the differences are between proof-of-work and proof-of-stake. On the other hand, if you try to explain what the internet is it’s an extremely easy task. This is because there is already a baseline of knowledge. Almost everyone uses it so the basic concepts are deeply engrained in many of us.

The internet was once just like crypto. It was a new technology that was unlike anything people had seen prior. The concept of connecting to the internet or using a search engine made little sense to most people. It wasn’t common to use a computer for a majority of the 90s, much less use a computer to connect to the internet.

Using a computer used to be incredibly esoteric. This made using the internet something that seemed too complicated to be worth the time and effort for many. Even people in today’s world would struggle with using many aspects of early computers, including the internet. As time has gone on many evolutions in computing have been made. Most importantly, in making them as accessible for the average person as possible.

Several of the largest computer-based companies, like Microsoft and Google, did so well because they created a product that made it much easier for the average person to interface with a computer. This is a major aspect in which crypto needs to grow. Companies like Coinbase and Binance are focused on making it as easy and safe as possible to buy cryptocurrencies. There are companies that are also working on making other aspects of crypto and blockchain technology easily usable for the general public.

The truth is that most people do not want to deal with all the extra steps involved in adopting new technology. They want things to be as simple as they possibly can. For a technology to be adopted on a large scale it not only needs to be useful, it also needs to be simple. The internet and computers have succeeded with this greatly, but crypto is only beginning this process.

By many estimates crypto is on the cusp of serious mainstream adoption making it similar to the internet of the mid to late 90s. Think of a time when e-commerce was in its infancy. Amazon had just been created. Early web browsers like Netscape navigator were in their prime and Google hadn’t even really gotten off the ground yet.

Many of the tools that will help crypto achieve mainstream adoption are being created right now. In retrospect it will seem obvious, but when you are in the midst of rapid development it’s hard to tell what will and won’t stick. Even those most knowledgeable in the crypto space are going to be completely wrong on their predictions for 20 or even 10 years into the future.

We really have no clue what the next few decades are going to look like for crypto or blockchain technology as a whole. In some ways it’s even silly to compare it to something like the internet — the most revolutionary technological advancement in our lifetimes. We still do though, because it’s our best indicator of where something like crypto could potentially be headed.

Overall, make sure to take this comparison with a grain of salt. Yes, crypto may continue the same trends as the internet and have an explosion in adoption over the next 20 years. The truth is, crypto will probably be very different in many ways even if it continues to see exponential growth. No matter what happens with crypto we will continue to see comparisons made with it and other major technological advancements. After all, history might not repeat, but often it does rhyme.