The Movement
The Cypherpunks of the 90s had their equivalent of the garage hackers like Woz and Bill Gates back in the 70s working on PCs.
In 1984 you had users adopting personal computers at a high rate, and while this was a huge trend, users were mostly niche enthusiasts, as mainstream had yet to adopt computers at a massive level. There was a sense this was leading to something even bigger, but nobody knew what that would be at the time. Use cases were limited to things like gaming, and later on, spreadsheets, and word processors.
The computers themselves were even on different hardware architectures, you had the IBM clones, Apples, and Commodores, to name a few.
To complement these standalone machines, people started buying modems, either to connect point to point, or to Bulletin Board Systems. Many users began to run their own BBS, and other companies like Compuserv eventually grew large with dedicated pools of resources where users could all interact with each other.
Some users ran BBSes with single lines, other with huge modem lines that could take hundreds of incoming modem connections.
- PC - Node (mining, masternode, validator)
- BBS - Blockchain network
- Compuserv - Exchange
Parallells
What the parallel here is all the different protocols. There were multiple different software solutions for running your own BBS. None of the BBS systems could talk to each other, and if they could, it was some very crude functionality.
None of the bulletin boards really had solid business use cases, they were mainly for hobbies to have fun or network with other users around the world. Others offered pirated software (Silk Road equivalent), which had a habit of running into problems with the FBI.
By the end of the decade, most of the hardware had standardized into two camps, mostly dominated by the IBM architecture and Microsoft (Wintel), and a smaller majority on Apple.
Then, in 1994, the web exploded, and pretty much eliminated the BBS.
Here in 2018, we have many projects working on interoperability, but right now the universe is full of different protocols and ideas. Though still confined mostly to the fintech sector, the technology remains in its infancy. Ideas are huge.
Looking Ahead
There's no overarching technology like the World Wide Web to bind it all. Will it happen? At some point, there will be a consolidation.
However, choice and different technologies are a good thing to try out right now. With no oligopoly out there to squelch competitors, innovation can thrive.
Many of us see this as bigger than the 1994 Web explosion, the mobile adoption, or the PC revolution, as it has the possibility to create a fundamental shift in society that hasn't been seen since the times of Adam Smith.
Adoption will have it's big Netscape moments, but running in parallel with those, many are quiet at work putting the plumbing together behind the scenes.
That next big thing? It's already here, we just don't know about it until 5 years from now. This is an ongoing, multi-decades revolution in the making.
Whatever happens, this is one of the most exciting times in the history of technology.
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