OCEANS

kkchangisin

Both the iPhone and internet required massive physical infrastructure deployment and investment from end users. When the iPhone was first released it was AT&T exclusive and AT&T spent a lot of time and resources building out a network that could handle the many multiples of data traffic the iPhone required. Yet it still put such tremendous pressure on the network it was unusable in many areas while AT&T scrambled to upgrade the network further across the board - towers, backhaul, internet peering, etc. People have literally died building out this infrastructure: https://www.propublica.org/article/cell-tower-fatalities As time has gone on we’ve had to sunset entire parts of licensed radio spectrum and move other radio applications, hardware, etc to make more room for cell bands. Oh and the iPhone itself was expensive, fragile, and guaranteed to be superseded in a year. It also wasn’t all that useful at first - it famously didn’t even support MMS and took years to get copy and paste! With the internet in the 90s it was even worse - trenching fiber and cable across the world, upgrading phone networks for DSL, installing dial up modems with local numbers across the world, and countless other factors. We were literally digging up entire countries. Block by block. Mile by mile. Not to mention SENDING SHIPS ACROSS OCEANS TO LAY FIBER. If you’re going to tell me the groundwork for the internet was decades in the making here’s a fun fact - the first fiber optic submarine cable was laid in 1988. 13 years later in 2001 at least 500 million users were on the internet. 13 years after bitcoin all of blockchain has roughly 100 million users. From the earliest days of the internet until at least the early 2000s getting on the internet required a computer that cost thousands of dollars (inflation adjusted) and was guaranteed to be practically worthless in 1-3 years. For the first five years I had the internet (until 1995 or so) I had to pay my ISP per minute AND pay long distance per minute charges to the phone company because my ISP didn’t have a local number. Yet even with these challenges the internet was so obviously beneficial it had at least a billion users within a decade of that era. Since the release of bitcoin in 2009 all you ever had to do was run an app on your cell phone or computer. What is that, an hour of your time? 10 minutes? Before you talk about how hard bitcoin was in the early days and how bad the UI/UX was let me tell you about Hayes commands, PPP chat scripts, just getting the IRQ settings right on your f’in ISA modem, etc. Everything about technology was much harder in the 90s when the internet exploded against those odds anyway. Bitcoin wasn’t slowed down for a decade like the internet was for me when I waited that long to finally get a cable modem. Bitcoin has had the opportunity to take advantage of the internet, mobile, social media, and more. Leveraging all of these platforms bitcoin adoption should be many multiples faster than the internet. Yet it’s actually more like 10% the rate. Here we are 13 years later and more than 98% of the five billion users on the internet don’t touch any cryptocurrencies or blockchain. Those are real numbers. If it actually solved a problem or made their lives better people would use it. It doesn’t and they don’t.