“The ‘a’ with the ring around it”
“It will replace the Yellow Pages as we know it today”
“Every business will be on the internet in the year 2000”
This 2 minute clip from 1995 is fascinating to watch.
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In 1994, only 5% of the US Population had access to the internet.
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By 2000, 58% of the US population had adopted the internet.
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Today, some 5 Billion people around the world have access to the internet, and Katie Couric’s notion of ‘information overload’ in the 1995 video clip feels very accurate.
Beyond adoption metrics, every single layer and usage metric for the internet has grown exponentially since its inception.
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Connected Devices: In 1973, 4 connected devices made up the original ARPANET. Less than 50 years later, we have more than 22 billion devices connected to the internet.
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Transmission: The early Ethernet cables of 1983 could transfer ~3 Megabits per second in bandwidth. Today, ethernet cables can transfer data at speeds of ~400 Gigabits per second. (100,000x growth in 40 years)
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Physical Footprint: What started as a direct line from California to Massachusetts (~3,000 miles), is now more than 745,000 miles of just underwater cabling connecting the physical internet backbone.
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Usage: Today there are more than 1.5 billion websites on the internet - an exponential increase from the ~17 million websites in 2000.
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Time: We now spend more than 6 hours a day interacting on the internet, double the time from a decade earlier.
It took time for the internet to become mainstream and move beyond the clunky dial up days of the 90s. But the exponential growth led to trillions of dollars in value and a new foundation of society. The 7 layer OSI model and the manner in which 1's and 0's stream across the world is something most of us don’t think about today.
Bitcoin is at a similar point of the early days of internet adoption.
From its inception in 2009 to today, the Bitcoin network has grown to be used by ~135 million people (wallet users). And over the next 5 years, this adoption is expected to increase to 1 billion people.
Just like the early internet days, things will evolve as everyone plugs in operations to this new monetary layer of society.
And just like the internet, Bitcoin’s network growth will continue to usher in a new era of money, business, and change worldwide.
We are in the early innings of this growth and adoption, and there is so much more to come.