Was the early internet used primarily for scams like blockchain is now?

The web was invented in 1989, and by 2002 we already had an entire dotcom explosion and collapse. Google was a four year old established company. Using the internet was completely mainstream. Everyone at every age was using it and had uses for it.

No, the early web was not primarily scams. Blockchain is well over a decade old and still searching for a way to be useful.

Early internet was mostly military or educational. No widespread usage among everyday people. No big scams that I’m aware of, but mostly because no one was using it or could use it.

The early Internet, I don't know, I wasn't there.

The early web certainly wasn't full of scams. It was mostly made of stuff like the strawberry pop-tart experiments, recently resurfaced on HN: https://www.pmichaud.com/toast/ . That was at the higher end of quality, and there was plenty of commercial stuff (think company websites, not eBay yet), but it all had that same spirit, which is so rare today. (HN has a bit of that spirit, which is worth putting up with some crap to get even a small dose of in these troubled days.)

There was a major discovery problem though, which led to things like webrings and the birth of search engines and spam. Maybe not in that order.

The early internet was purely technical...mainly military, university.

The early 'mass internet' of the early to mid 90s is when I started on it. In my experience, it was mostly people looking for entertainment and chatting. The web was new, barebones, and fascinating. It was nowhere near as scummy as it is now.

Scams of some sort have always existed...phishing, get rich quick schemes, etc. Mainly delivered by email. It definitely was by no means primarily for scams. I'd argue the internet today is more scammy than the early internet was, ignoring blockchain.

I got on the internet in the mid-90s. The early internet was used for:

- E-mail

- Personal websites

- Porn

- Instant messaging via ICQ

- Chat via IRC

- Multiplayer video gaming

- Communities via Messageboards

- Downloading software and music

- Searching for aliens (SETI)

It all felt very wholesome. Although there was a movie about hacking for fun and profit (Hackers), so I'm sure there was some of that too - but eCommerce and social networking didn't become a thing until the mid-2000s, which gradually brought the real masses and along with them, scams galore.

I think the key word in your question is "primarily." And because of that I would say not at all. The early Internet was people having the ability to connect and communicate with others all over the world. Being able to meet, or learn, or buy from people even in the next state was completely game changing. Before it would have required physical catalogs, or getting someones phone number, etc. But the Internet made it happen at an unbelievable speed which is why it took over.

That was it's "job" per se. Did people use this new ability to try to scam others, sure, just like they did with bogus ads for hovercrafts in the back of magazines in prior years. But the technology itself was about this instant communication.

So people wanted to move all offline stuff to online. That is why first boom was just things you can do offline, but now online. Buy pet supplies...online. But groceries...online. Etc, while the winners of that era didn't just recreate offline businesses online, but improved them based on the paradigm shift it enabled.

Blockchain feels like a technology looking for a "job." I understand there are some countries where maybe the job is being able to move money, although I am not convinced that it is is net positive in those cases. The biggest thing I think I have realized is that I have never been in a situation, where I think to myself, "If I could just use the blockchain to do this, it would be incredible."

And if after all of these years, that thought hasn't hit you even once, then I think that says something about whether it is actually improving anything.

The early internet, no, but scammers soon came and still use the internet heavily. Ever heard of email spam and phishing? Still enormous. We have filters that help a lot, but it's still a huge problem.

eBay came into existence to try and allow people to buy and sell over the internet without getting scammed. I still got scammed by an eBay seller in the early days. Everyone did. But eventually their reputation system worked and buying and selling on eBay is pretty safe.

Just a couple of examples, but if you think just a little you can remember various frauds and scams, ponzi schemes, personal information harvesting, etc., etc., that all make heavy use of the internet

The first email spam was sent in 1978[1], if that’s something you count. Interestingly, Hashcash, the first proof-of-work system, was actually invented to stop email spam. This is a loaded question, anyway. Most technologies will eventually become ‘primarily’ used for spam or scams by some metrics. 60% of all phone calls are spam or scams[2] creating $18bn+ in losses due to fraud[3]. 85% of all emails are spam[4]. 70% of all registered domain names are malicious[5]. Yet people don’t typically describe these systems as ‘primarily used for scams’. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email_spam 2. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-phones-were-hit-... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_fraud 4. https://dataprot.net/statistics/spam-statistics/ 5. https://www.scmagazine.com/news/malware/vast-majority-of-new...

No, primarily larks and amusement and interesting stuff. This was largely a labor of love, showing faith in internationalism and humanity

From very early on, there were crossovers of classic scams and MLM, such as $$$MAKE.MONEY.FAST$$$ [0]. By the late 90's spam email of this sort was common enough that people wanted a filtering solution; at first keywords were enough, and later Bayesian filters. Eventually Gmail stepped up to the plate and hit a home run on automatic spam detection, which played a big role in positive early reviews.

The late 90's also saw the rise of retail electronic stock trading(where previously, one called up the broker and they handled the trade), which created a huge boom in pump group activities. Often the tactics were quite simplistic and just involved spamming forums with sockpuppeting. Though there were prosecutions years later, the learnings of these pump groups did persist in the penny markets, and ultimately carried over into crypto and created some foundational archetypes.

During the 2000's, scam activity shifted towards ecommerce, affiliate marketing, MMO item trading and the like. This was when "search engine optimization" first became a thing. And as you can see by looking at the current results of most Google searches, SEO has basically won. The open Internet outside the walls is overrun with noise.

So, while you can absolutely have gotten around back then without being personally affected, I believe it is also correct to say that it was always there, and in fact, has become a deeper problem over time. Blockchain tech is another useful vehicle, but it's one among many, and the open nature of the most popular ledgers makes for more eye-popping headlines.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Money_Fast (I recall it with the excessive dollar signs, the article has it with periods. So I did both.)

Nope. Early days of web were fun, especially since not everyone and their grandmother were terminally online.

No far from it. The early web was people putting their interests online, in the hope that someone might be on the same wavelength and discover them. Before that it was just academia and then it blew up with the web and email.

I'd say the main thing that revolutionised the public internet was TRUST. The early days was an era where people would be genuinely cautious about what might happen behind the website. It was initially a tough proposition to send your money off to a website in the hope that something might arrive in the post some time later. What eBay in particular did was create the feedback system, where we could gain ratings points for doing what we said we were going to do.

I feel like this trust system and the legitimisation of e-commerce has made the importance of this fade into the background. Now, we are in an age where seemingly millions of people get embroiled in schemes of little utility in the blind faith they will make them rich, somehow.

No, this is what people who are too deep into crypto tell themselves and each other in order to sleep a bit better at night.

I started using it in 1995. At that time no. The crypto space appears to be ~99% scams and vaporware while the early internet was maybe not even %1 scams, being restricted to email spam (I don't remember that being a problem for me until years later) or Usenet newsgroup spam.

Maybe something will come out the crypto space which is actually revolutionary and useful, but it remains to be seen. With early internet it was immediately obvious that this was going to be a gamechanger, and had real utility whereas most of the crypto space appears to be ponzi speculation.

It all depends on your perspective. Is the military–industrial complex a scam? Maybe, but loads of useful technology has come out of it. Internet is one of those technologies.

Keep in mind that between 1969 and, say, ~1990, there were very few people on the Internet. Many of them were academics who had access to Internet via their university. Internet access wasn’t a mainstream thing. So trust was probably quite high between them. And very little commerce took place on the Internet. In the 80’s, Internet was not free from criminal activity, but it was not really that much compared to how cyber criminals operate today.

Some pointers to further reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_co...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)

No, the early internet was full of people just having fun, trying out new things. You could see things like a coffee pot on a live camera. You could chat with random strangers around the globe. I talked with someone in Novosibirsk, if I recall correctly. The data miners and spammers didn't yet sniff out the commercial value of it all. It was silly, and funny, and not very profitable.

The thing with Blockchain scams (shitcoins), is that it feels like the creators of these coins often really believe they are going to be providing a useful service, a new innovation better than traditional financial services, better than Bitcoin. But they just don't think it all the way through. It's hard to think it all the way through!

But don't get me wrong, there are also most definitely some outright scams in the crypto world too.

Not in the same way, but they're fundamentally different technologies. The Internet is fundamentally a communications technology; blockchain is fundamentally a financial technology.

The (very-)early Internet was largely used to distribute scientific papers. Once it hit the mainstream, it was used to setup fan pages for bands, chat with people across the globe, share experiences with esoteric hobbies, and basically do things like Hacker News but at scale.

If you look at other financial technologies like the joint-stock corporation or the stock market, they absolutely were used primarily for scams. Read up on the history of the stock market c. 1850-1860, particularly financiers like Jay Gould; it was absolutely crazy, with scams, panics, market corners, and bankruptcies far worse than anything in the crypto space now. Same with the joint stock corporation, which was first developed so that you could colonize and exterminate the natives without any one person having legal liability for that. (Well, that and so when a ship's crew never came home, nobody was liable.)

> [...] like blockchain is now?

Hard to take the question seriously when it's such a loaded question.

Maybe don't state a hypothesis as a fact in the question.

It started out for mostly academic and high-end tech uses, so no.

Stupid people didn’t have access to the early internet. Then enteral September struck and… well, here we all are.

Not until credit card processing (both online and over the phone) became readily accessible to fly-by-nights, and online banking money transfers to strangers became possible. Prior to that, to scam someone you had to phone them up and convince them. After that, you could write them an email.

The early internet definitely wasn't used primarily for scams. I'm sure there were a few scammers around in those days (who multiplied with the dot-com boom), but primarily? Definitely not.

If you mean the internet of the time when consumers first got it, around 1999, absolutely not. I don't even remember scams being remotely as common.

You were just as likely to be scammed in a retail store or a magazine ad.

The technology was horrible. I would take today's CSS3 and JS frameworks any day. It was slow, despite being largely text and JS free.

But the content made up for it. The content was all written by real people, on real pages you could link to, no endless scrolling.

I always say 2005-2009 was when everything but tech got really miserable.

No. Scams have always existed and folks were wary of providing personal information. There was a discussion about what to call it. Ibahn was my favorite. Broswers and www did not exist. You could poke around and find file folders of organizations, open them up and read the files therein. People were clueless, the CFO at my company spent most of his day looking at pron. Even before ATT built its data vacuum in SOMA there was a sense that that worst fears of a surveillance state were neigh.

A lot of it was mercifully stuff like alt.tv.x-files. It was great.

Money didn't come into it until the first search engines allowed the monetisation of the Net. (Unless you consider the difficulty of computer faculties getting funding from University administrations.)

Prior to that, it was 99% an interactive learning area with the oldies teaching the newbies. In fact probably 95% of the Net back then was run by Universities all over the world.

yesn't? there was a big issue after commercialization (1993) of the internet as credit card companies did not have the protocols to feel comfortable processing payments, so everything was seen as a problem to them, this has only recently improved but also regressed due to fintech apps flagging and freezing everything arbitrarily

pre-commercialization (pre-1993) there were prevalent scams purely due to being a communication method without a transactional method

pre-commercialization there is no way to quantify it at this point, but if we are looking at transactional demand then maybe it was primarily for scams? if we are saying speculation isn't utility, then the internet was primarily useless pre-commercialization as well, as much of the daily demand was also volume for stock trading and speculation.

it might be becoming clear that blockchains would also have to be held to an equivalent standard of determining if you want to like the prevalent use cases of speculation, or consider it all a scam all the way down. but for people within the blockchain space, the volume is primarily not within things those people call scams, things that undermine expectations aka rug pulls.

but also, your premise itself may be misaligned, when people say early internet they aren't talking about the WWW, many are talking about the protocols, the time period where it wasn't clear if TCP/IP was even going to be the underpinning standard, and other protocols were co-existing and continuing being developed by different teams, or even early with Darpanet in the late 1960s. A more direct comparison here would be all the different blockchains and all the different protocols on top of those blockchains. Where each one rapidly iterates to more traction and there is crossdrift to implementing the same protocol design on a different blockchain.

with that view, blockchain has been wildly successful and growing at a very fast pace, compressing 40 years of activity into just 10. But when thinking about just the WWW +10 years, then blockchain is only growing at a moderate pace.

How early? In the 2000s there were plenty of scams. I still remember falling for a banner ad scam "You are the 1000000th customer and you won a prize" sitting for hours submitting form after form survey after survey card after card until I gave up from frustration.

As soon as consumers started onboarding to it, absolutely.

On top of the other examples mentioned in this thread, it wasn't that long ago that the internet was plagued with pop-up scams left and right. We forget about it now because browsers have eliminated that vector for the most part.

The early internet was mostly academic.

A bit later on, things like viruses and spyware became a major issue. It took a while for the people making browsers and operating systems to realize how severe a security problem the internet would be.

Financial scams ? Email and spam supported a fair share such as the 419 scam

Chain emails were common, and were mostly just annoying. But some would ask you to send money in exchange for getting much more sent to you later.

The early internet had a lot of novelty trends. The one that sticks out to me is "e-mail chains". I remember logging on to the net in 1995 at the age of ~7 years old (only 6 years after its establishment).

The answer is no -- the internet wasn't rife with scams. The dotcom bubble, however, was RIFE with garbage companies that formed and dissolved in months.

Bitcoin has been around for 14 years now. If we map blockchain progress to the internet itself, or even 3d graphics (which materialized at roughly the same time as the internet with Jurassic Park coming out in 1992 and DOOM in 1993), then we are basically in the year 2003.

By 2003, we basically had all the big players we have today - Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, but they were much smaller. EBay and Yahoo were considered in the same league at that time. Cloud computing and centralization of the infrastructure of the internet was not yet a thing.

The problem with blockchain and VCs is that there is this cargo cult attached to it. The idea is that a bunch of libertarian nerds in their 20s made it big on the internet, so the 2022 version of that must hold true with blockchain. This is a bit silly. If we step back, blockchain is mostly an improvement on ACH bank transfers and a few other things. The rest of that space is just pure Ponzinomics.

Any one remember the make money fast scams flying around the Usenet groups and in emails?

kinda self incrimatory but it was fucking easy to scam people in online forums back then.

i think no matter what the decade is, scammers gonna scam and fools gonna get taken advantage.

MAKE MONEY FAST

Look up Eternal September.

No.