Compare to the dawn of the commercial internet, and it makes a little bit of sense.

Most of us know the internet has been around in different forms for many decades, but it wasn't until the 1990s that commercial use took off. Easy distribution of information was the killer technology: web pages and search engines made instant trips to the library for the silliest questions a normal thing. Amazon was one of the first to get online retail sales right: they picked a fungible type of merchandise (books, which are 99% software and 1% hardware, so you don't really need to try before you buy a specific copy, which means you're fine with a mail-order shopping model). Clearly this wasn't just something cool -- it was a better way of doing things that are a part of everyone's daily life.

But then lots of other folks piled on with increasingly worse "me too!" ideas. Pets.com is the poster child: yeah, you can buy dog food over the internet, but _should_ you? But there was lots of demand in the form of people realizing a little too late that the internet was a huge investment opportunity, and "Amazon except for kitty litter" was close enough to scratch the itch, so the money piled in.

The most positive angle of the dot-com bust is that a lot of incredible technology did come out of it. Google was far from the first search engine, but it had the benefit of learning from the mistakes of Lycos, InfoSeek, Yahoo, AltaVista, and Excite. Facebook was SixDegrees except targeting an amazing combination of elites (top-tier colleges) and young adults experiencing newfound freedom + maximum horniness (college students). Even Microsoft has successfully reinvented itself as a pretty good PaaS provider.

So here we are. Bitcoin started ages ago, in 2009. Some people got it at first, and many to this day still dismiss it as a scam (though I know nobody who understands the technology and thinks it's anything but genuinely revolutionary). But increasingly, people are realizing that, like the internet, Bitcoin has introduced killer technology: decentralized distribution of truth. I haven't yet seen the Amazon of Bitcoin that so obviously connects commercial potential with this new blockchain technology -- perhaps it is Bitcoin itself, where a large percentage of the world stores at least some of its wealth there and it becomes part of the fabric of daily lives -- but there is no doubt that it will arrive, and that there will be more of them soon after that, and that there will be a day in our lifetimes when we can't imagine how we lived our lives needing to consult a government, or an agency, or a giant corporation, or a bureaucracy to learn the truth whether we possess liquid assets, whether we own property, whether we have a professional credential, etc.

Unfortunately (but just like the late 1990s), most of the current ventures are garbage, and nobody knows which is which. Moreover, some of them weren't even created in good faith -- just like IPOs in the late 1990s, some of these offerings are patently absurd. So lots of wealth will be transferred, much unfairly and much semi-randomly. Many people will be hurt.

But out of it will come the next Google, Amazon, and Facebook.