The "Internet" is not really a good comparison. The Internet existed for decades before it took off in the late 90s. And blockchain is part of the Internet--just another protocol.
What you're really talking about is the Web. That's the inflection point. Even email, a non-Web-based technology, saw a huge surge in adoption after free webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo came on the scene.
The big difference between the early Web and early blockchain is the barrier to entry. It was easy to set up websites--still is. That's how you got so many super young people finding huge success out of nowhere.
In comparison, blockchain has an incredibly hard barrier to entry. Not to use it--to build it. If you want to build a robust reliable blockchain, you need very solid cryptography skills. Very few people have that.
The structure of the growth has inverted. In the late 90s you had a lot of people you never heard of, and who were routinely dismissed by industry leaders. But they were building real products that took real business away from old established companies. The Web grew ground-up.
Today, the biggest pushers of blockchain are big established companies. Goldman Sachs. IBM. JP Morgan. The New York Stock Exchange. Big banks, big lawyers, big investors, etc.
I've been meeting with government entities in a country who IBM is heavily influencing with marketing. There are very low hanging fruit kind of technical problems that can be easily solved by mediocre CRUD app developers but due to the money in this region, companies like Oracle and more recently IBM has swooped in and sold them a bunch of things they don't need and have no idea how to integrate to solve the problems they're facing. Don't know how to build REST APIs? Buy our middleware!
Sitting down with people in charge of making these decisions and it's apparent they haven't the slightest clue what they're getting into. Their teams don't have the technical ability to build REST APIs to integrate with each others services, and now they've bought into IBM's message queue without a single developer on their side with the competence or experience to know what it is.
They've sold them solutions without taking into consideration the problem.
Now blockchain is the newest buzzword, spoken about like some magic IT pixie dust that was just invented to solve any technical problem -- "NOW you can go paperless, can make transactions, can store health records, provide government services" as if before it wasn't possible. Somehow people with no technical background are profiting immensely by holding conferences and speaking about things they don't understand. People are literally conversing with each other without having any idea what they're saying.
We got an email recently from an entity that is very interested in our platform stating "we want your product, and all new software must be blockchain enabled," whatever that means.
I recently went to a tech event first person I met was pitching his blockchain company about to launch next month. When questioned, within a few minutes he relented that they were not using blockchain at all.
What you're really talking about is the Web. That's the inflection point. Even email, a non-Web-based technology, saw a huge surge in adoption after free webmail services like Hotmail and Yahoo came on the scene.
The big difference between the early Web and early blockchain is the barrier to entry. It was easy to set up websites--still is. That's how you got so many super young people finding huge success out of nowhere.
In comparison, blockchain has an incredibly hard barrier to entry. Not to use it--to build it. If you want to build a robust reliable blockchain, you need very solid cryptography skills. Very few people have that.
The structure of the growth has inverted. In the late 90s you had a lot of people you never heard of, and who were routinely dismissed by industry leaders. But they were building real products that took real business away from old established companies. The Web grew ground-up.
Today, the biggest pushers of blockchain are big established companies. Goldman Sachs. IBM. JP Morgan. The New York Stock Exchange. Big banks, big lawyers, big investors, etc.