Benedict Evans, a general partner at venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, told his followers on Twitter that “crypto today” is similar to the internet in 1993 and 1999.
Crypto today has a lot in common with both the internet in 1993 and the internet in 1999. Huge potential with few of the use cases invented yet, combined with froth, scams and delusion. This makes it easier to dismiss (“useless AND a scam!”).
— Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) October 29, 2018
According to Evans, there’s “a lot in common” between the internet in the 90s and the crypto industry today as the internet back then also had “huge potential with few of the use cases invented yet.”
Crypto Like “Pre TCP/IP Prototocol” Internet
As most crypto analysts have pointed out, the digital asset and blockchain industry are in their early stages of development. Dr. Neha Narula, the director of MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative, believes crypto-related technology is not even mature enough to be compared to the internet in the 1990s.
Narula thinks that the protocols and distributed ledger technology (DLT) infrastructure that exists today is analogous to the internet’s state of development in the late 1970s. Specifically, the MIT computer science Phd said the cryptocurrency platforms of today are comparable to the how the internet was before the introduction and adoption of the TCP/IP protocol.
Those familiar with how the TCP/IP protocol is defined would know that it provides a set of communication protocols that facilitate “end-to-end data communication.” This was a very important breakthrough for internet-related technology as it allowed different platforms to reliably exchange information with each other.
Blockhain Interoperability
Similarly, there are currently many startup projects focused on facilitating effective communication between structurally different and independent blockchain networks. However, the blockchains of today not only appear to have fairly limited use cases as Evans noted, but they also have scalability and security-related problems.
In addition to technical issues that are holding back their mass adoption, blockchain-based cryptocurrency projects have been associated with a large number of scams and “delusion”, Evans’ tweet mentioned.
Interestingly, there were also many DotCom startups launched before the internet bubble burst that were outright scams. The increasing number of fraudulent activities carried out by internet-related companies during the late 90s and early 2000s discouraged many investors at the time from investing in such businesses.
Keep An Eye Out For Good Projects
Ben Horowitz, the billionaire co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, said in September that there were many bad internet startups who carried out scams. He explained that what we’ve learned from those experiences is it was “stupid” to give up on the internet because of them.
He added that many legitimate companies such as Facebook, Youtube, and Google were launched because of the dotcom craze. Similarly, there may be bad crypto projects out there, but it would be wise to closely monitor the space as there will likely be some legitimate products that will be launched.
