Video Proof that Bitcoin Today is like the Internet in 1995

Jeff Berwick
Activist Post

The Internet has changed the world. It has changed the way humans interact and do business. There aren’t many people today who could even imagine their life without the Internet.

It’s amazing to consider that just twenty years ago most people didn’t even know what it was.

For instance, in 1995, in the following clip, David Letterman and Bill Gates discuss the Internet.

Bill Gates calls the web “wild”, and David Letterman clearly has no idea what the Internet even is. He couldn’t get his head around why the Internet is any better than radio and even questioned whether the Internet “was still around”. I suspect in the coming months, perhaps before Stephen Colbert takes over for him, David might ask if Bitcoin is still around.

In the following clip, from 1994, Brian Gumbel asks, “What is the Internet anyway?”

The Sun, which is now being forced to an all-digital platform or risk bankruptcy like so many dinosaur news outlets, even predicted the Internet would never work.

And, to add icing to the cake, the great Paul Krugman of the New York Times had this to say about the Internet in 1998, ” The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’ — which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants — becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s. As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly.”

Another great call from the economic genius who has since come up with faking an alien attack and making a coin worth a trillion dollars as some of his ideas to “improve” the economy.

Interestingly, the one person who foresaw the Internet quite well actually foresaw it in 1974. That was Arthur C. Clarke, the science fiction writer who nearly picked it to a “T”.

And, to give myself some credit, back in 2000 (when the Internet was already fairly advanced but many people still thought it was just a “bubble”) I predicted much of what we are seeing today… and did it while doing my best impression of Lance Bass!

But, the main point being, that Bitcoin today reminds me of the early days of the Internet where many of us who were harkening it to be the next great game-changer weren’t very well understood and often scoffed at.

Last year I had to slowly explain what Bitcoin was on Fox Business amongst many other “news” outlets. It felt like deja-vu of the mid to late ’90s with the Internet.

The “crash” Stuart Varney was referring to in the above video, by the way, was Bitcoin falling from $200 to $100 … before it took off to above $1,000 and now rests near $400.

In any case, as I wrote in the November issue of The Dollar Vigilante (subscribe here), the lack of talk on Bitcoin right now in the media and across the Internet is a good sign. It means that most of the speculators are out of the market and those who want to sell have sold. Yet, at the same time, Venture Capital money has been coming into Bitcoin at the same rate as it did into the Internet in 1995.

The period between 1995 and late 1998 was a strange one also as the initial interest subsided during those years but then were propelled into the sky by 1999 when anything with “dot com” in its name was worth millions or billions.

As The End Of The Monetary System As We Know It (TEOTMSAWKI) continues down its preordained path, cryptocurrencies will skyrocket as fiat currencies of all shapes and colors fall by the wayside.

Mark my words that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general will continue to rise until they are just as ubiquitous as the Internet today. I’ve seen this all before.

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Anarcho-Capitalist.  Libertarian.  Freedom fighter against mankind’s two biggest enemies, the State and the Central Banks.  Jeff Berwick is the founder of The Dollar Vigilante, CEO of TDV Media & Services and host of the popular video podcast, Anarchast.  Jeff is a prominent speaker at many of the world’s freedom, investment and gold conferences including his own, Anarchapulco, as well as regularly in the media including CNBC, CNN and Fox Business.