Those comparisons are incredibly mismatched. In 1980 a computer cost as much as a car, and network connections were incredibly expensive and slow. Bill Gates, child of wealth and privilege, famously had to use a shared computer paid for by his elite school because even the child of an IBM board member wouldn’t have access to a computer! The microprocessor revolution unfolded in the 80s, however, so even your timeline is off by over a decade because people paid money to get online because things like email, telnet, Usenet, and FTP were immediately useful. By 1995, the web was already multiple years into extreme growth – very little of which was directly related to selling as opposed to all of the things you could do with it. Nobody was saying you should buy a modem and sit on it before reselling it at a profit, they were talking about all of the things you could do once you had one!

Similarly, nobody doubted that neural networks were capable of very interesting things - the holdup was the level of processing power needed to run them. As soon as that changes, useful applications abounded.

Those make quite the contrast with bitcoin which has been universally available to a much, much larger population and had truly massive resources available, but almost no meaningful impact because it doesn’t give most people anything new or better. The few businesses which aren’t trying to market it and still accept it almost universally convert BTC into real currency as soon as they receive it, companies like Western Union and Visa haven’t felt the need to lower rates, and to the extent that PayPal is reconsidering screwing everyone so aggressively it’s because of Venmo and Stripe, not Bitcoin.

Crypto-currency isn't about the technology.

It's a political experiment centred around replacing the existing financial system.

And the mistake there is that people in the crypto space are ignorant about how that world works. Namely that there is such a large overlap with the government that you're in essence trying to disrupt governments. Which is a losing battle.

IMO, your timelines are way off and the goalposts are totally skewed. In 1980, the Commodore 64 hadn't even been released yet. Even so, 15 years later, in 1995, almost 15% of adults had dialup access to the Internet. The real goalpost here is the advent of the WWW.

TBL released his paper and source code for the WWW on April 30, 1993. On that date, all that existed was an idea and a command line browser. Most people only knew the web in those early years as "that thing you could reach by telnet to info.cern.ch".

Even given this modest start, fifteen years later, in 2008, nearly 75% of adults used the internet according to a Pew research study (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2015/06/26/americans-in...). In 2008, we already saw the emergence of the e-commerce market, with upstart Amazon already commanding a 1% share of the entire retail market (to put in perspective, that grew to ~6% by 2019, according to Census and Morgan Stanley data: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chart-shows-just-big-amazon-r...). Heck, by 2008, you could watch a movie instantaneously on your TV without renting or buying the DVD! (https://web.archive.org/web/20080525201828/http://www.netfli...)

So yes, you can determine something about the relative strength of a particular technology by the speed it is adopted in the marketplace. Fifteen years is a long time, and even taking into account the slow Internet speeds between 1993 and 2008, people found enough value in the Web to use it on a daily basis. I don't see the same adoption curve for cryptocurrencies.

I don't recall ever reading about a tulip ETF, though, that could be kind of interesting