And depending on when you define the "launch" of the internet, it's 10 year anniversary was in 1999, square in the AOL timeperiod that the parent comment was talking about.
I know you put launch in quotes, but just to emphasize - the internet was launched much earlier than 1989 in terms of the technology. The base technology was worked on in the 60s and 70s, and things like email were already in use in the 70s and early 80s.
Of course, digital cash has been worked on for many years too, but if you compare the bitcoin whitepaper to, say, the TCP/IP RFC, then you'd expect AOL-comparable bitcoin usage in 2030, more or less.
If you compare this underwater spacetravel whitepaper I wrote in 2008 to, say, the TCP/IP RFC, then you'd also expect AOL-comparable underwater space travel usage in 2030, more or less.
AOL's heyday was more like '93. By 95-96, connecting directly to the internet was becoming explosively popular and everyone was starting an ISP. Source: first hand experience.
A wildly speculative investment in an era of really low (in fact somewhat negative) interest rates? I mean we have a global asset bubble in general, it's not surprising that some of it is spilling into new and untested stores of value, i suppose.
I agree that current crypto-currency ecosystems are pretty insane, but the original idea was super-cool.
Every traditional investment seems to be getting safer and lower in return, so there's all this capital looking for something better...and it's like people assume that high return and high risk go together, so let's invent stuff that has artificially created risk! I was listening to someone who said it's like the opposite of what led to the financial crisis, where they were repackaging risky investments into ostensibly safe derivatives. Now we're creating risky investments out of nothing because we don't seem to have enough risk these days...
Bitcoin is 10 years old... hardly the "early days" in tech.