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A personal look at the early days of Internet vs blockchain today
I had already played with HTML pretty early and thought it was cool as a way of publishing documents. I discovered it as early as 1993 when I first saw the mosaic executable in the /usr/local/bin directory of my workstation at University.

I only really started working seriously on web applications in 1994 when my university adviser told me to look at NCSA’s newly released CGI spec. Prior to that I had been deep into a hopeless project trying to build a complex networked multimedia front end in C++.

I have frequently compared the current state of blockchain to the state of the early days of the internet. From 2013–2015 I kept saying were at a similar state to 1994 for the web. Last years ICO craze was similar to 1995 when the Netscape IPO made everyone go collectively insane.

I think we are close to reaching 1996, where people are still insane but a lot of really cool stuff is also being built, yet is overshadowed by the crazyness.

Of course the comparison is not perfect and not at all linear.

So take these years as a grain of salt. But there are many good lessons to be had from the technological adoption of the internet back then.

Early fascination with the Solution, not the Problem
When new complex technology fascinates us nerds, we are often so enamored with the elegance and innovation of the solution that we end up having a really difficult time explaining it or selling it.

Me in 1994 explaining my fascination with the internet to people:

The Internet is a way of transmitting data that routes around censorship. It does this by taking data, splitting it into packets and sending them from one node to the next until they reach their final destination and assembles themselves again. It’s so cool!!!!
Me in 2013 explaining my fascination with Bitcoin to people:

Bitcoin is a way of sending money from anyone to anyone without censorship or gatekeepers. It does this by you holding a private key that transmits a transaction onto a peer to peer network, where thousands of computers compete to cryptographically include it in a block of transactions trusted by everyone else on the network.
The problem statement for both, were not really a problem for a lot of people. Yes for us paranoid anarcho libertarians, people living in dictatorships and in the developing world. But for most “normal” people in the developed world?

And that explanation of the solution? For the internet, no one cares today. For blockchain no one will care tomorrow.

Key with both of these stories is that they were factually correct, but way more fascinated with the solution than the actual problem.

Groundbreaking solution becomes industry
While the Internet was definitely a thing in 1994, there was no real concept of an internet industry or business. By August, 1995 after the Netscape IPO it was in full swing.

AltaVista
Louis Monier a researcher at Digital Equipment Corp’s (DEC) Palo Alto Research Labs had launched the AltaVista Search engine in December, 1995 and it became one of the first big overnight success stories for a web site and the most important search engine of its time as well.

The executives at the previously very innovative but now stuffy DEC realized that hey we are an Internet company and just as cool and valuable as Netscape.

DEC already had a huge portfolio of successful networking products, that they sold to enterprises, governments and universities. Everything from routers and network cards, to firewalls and email servers (supporting X.400).

These were almost over night moved into the hastily created Internet Business Unit and all rebranded with the name AltaVista.

By January, 1996 I was living in Kingston, Jamaica running CaribWeb and a series of somewhat successful tourism related web sites.

Anyone who could spell HTML, CGI and PERL were in great demand for all the new “Web Master” jobs being created. Recruiters had already been trying for months, but I was not crazy about leaving my business and enjoyed life in the Caribbean.

I finally accepted a job as Corporate Web Master for AltaVista as one of the first hires onto the team. Within weeks we had hired most of the disolutioned marketing execs from Lotus, who had just lost the office suite battle to Microsoft.

Our mantra was Internet, Internet, Internet and that no one was more experienced or had as wide a portfolio as we did. Our main target market was all other businesses who desperately wanted to relabel themselves as being Internet businesses.

Of course Internet being the solution, the problems were not quite as obvious yet for the Internet to solve. So just like many other early businesses in the space, we sold Internet solutions to other people building Internet solutions.

It was a Bubble, but we all won from it
It is quite understandable that sensible people back then also called the Internet industry a giant ponzi scheme.

You could easily say that the primary business model of the Internet industry from 1995 to 2000 was IPO’ing and raising stock price through press releases about partnerships with other internet startups.

I don’t want to fault this process though. We all benefit today from this crazy seemingly pointless innovation that came out of it. Most of the core technologies and developer knowledge we still use today was funded out of this .com frenzy.

While this happened there were still a few companies that stayed true to their vision, while benefiting from the crazyness. Amazon is the best and most well known example.

When the distractions of only operating to raise your stock price disappeared in 2000, Internet businesses focused on solving real problems were finally able to do so. Most of the big internet companies today were started around this time.

From a technological point of view after the 2000 crash, no one had money to pay Sun and Oracle license fees anymore. Apache, Linux, mysql, Java, PHP etc. took off.