Early Days of Crypto Vs. Early Days of Internet

How difficult was it to get online in the mid-90s and how does this relate to the current user experience in the crypto world?

Many people complain that the crypto world is for geeks only — and in a way they are right. Buying and selling cryptocurrencies, creating wallets, using cryptographic keys to sign the transactions, establishing a safe cold storage, and so forth — these tasks are too complicated for today’s average computer user and represent a considerable obstacle to the mass adoption of cryptocurrencies.

However, development of the blockchain and cryptocurrency technology is currently still in its early days, and the user experience will significantly improve over time. Let’s compare the current crypto user experience with the beginnings of the commercialization of the internet.

I’ll try and illustrate the cumbersome process of getting online in the mid-90s for those of you who were not able to partake in this experience:

• 1.Installing a dial-up modem. The laptop computers with inbuilt modems were uncommon, and desktop computers usually didn’t have one. So, firstly, you had to buy a dial-up modem and install it into your computer.
  
  A dial-up modem

• 2. Connecting the modem to the telephone network. Then you needed to buy a few meters of telephone cable and attach it to the telephone line in your house.

• 3. Obtaining a dial-up internet account. Before the commercial internet service providers (ISPs) entered the market, the dial-up access to the internet had been usually offered by universities and research networks. You were required to send them a written application to be granted an internet-access account and your own email address at their domain.

• 4. Setting up a dial-up connection. After having gained the official access, it was time to dive deeply into the geekiest of your computer settings. Check these Windows 3.1. dial-up settings to get the taste of the sweat below the fingers of an average user.

• 5. Establishing the internet connection. Providing that you have finally managed to persuade your computer to work with your modem, the time was finally ripe to dial up your ISP using your land phone line (check the famous dial-up modem “handshake” sound ). While you were connected to the internet, your only phone line in the house was busy, of course. If any of your (likely impatient) family members had accidentally picked up the phone, your internet connection was lost, and you had to redial the ISP (or wait until your mother got off the phone with her mother-in-law).

• 6. Installing a web browser. What seems so obvious today, was yet another ordeal in the past: you had to download the browser installation file via an FTP and install it manually. The Netscape Navigator was the king among browsers in the mid-90s, with a market share of over 80%.

• 7. Browsing the internet with an impressive speed of 14.4 kbps! In today’s terms, this means 0.0144 Mbps. How fast is this? It takes over 9 minutes to download a 1 MB photo. And back in the day, slow meant pricy, as the internet access was charged per time you spent online.

If you were not at least a little bit of a geek, you were not able to enjoy using the internet in the early days. Say, how many of you ever think about internet protocols such as TCP/IP, HTTP, IMAP, POP, or SMTP nowadays? That’s right, you don’t give a darn about them! And why should you? You just grab your phone which is connected to the internet all the time and you couldn’t care less about the huge variety of protocols that your apps use to provide you with different services.

The same will happen with the blockchain and crypto — nobody will care about the underlying technology and various protocols; we will simply use the apps built on top of them. We will use our phones which will securely store the private keys for us, and we will be able to sign the transactions with a fingerprint, by facial recognition, or some other, yet unforeseen, solution.

In the early days of the internet, nobody could have imagined how it would transform our lives in the years to come. The same will happen with blockchain and cryptocurrencies — both will have a significant impact on our society in ways we cannot even imagine today.

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