This post is targeted at more of a developer audience than my usual writings. Whatever technical jargon is here shouldn’t distract from the point too much if you just skim past it and keep reading.
Whenever I see the too-often FUD about some country evicting miners, KYCing wallets, or suing some company or other I repeat this mantra: the tide of technology cannot be stopped. Technology is like a liquid that erodes whatever barriers you erect. It seeps through the cracks of the thickest stone wall. Trying to suppress it is like trying to compress a balloon with your hands; wherever your hands aren’t, the air comes popping out. There is no barrier you can put in place to stop the tide of technology. Nations may be able to slow progress a bit, at great expense to themselves, but their failure is inevitable.
This is as true for blockchains as it was for the internet in China, electricity, and the invention of writing. Every major technology has had it’s objectors, and the luddites of yesteryear lost as surely as the luddites of today will.
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
-Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
We are already past the inflection point where it would be deeply unpopular to ban crypto. This technology is being adopted faster than the internet. We’re on track to reach a billion users in 3-5 years. We are at the bottom of the S curve, staring at a 6 billion user cliff and a once-in-an-ever opportunity. This isn’t just the rise of a new company or a new commodity; this is the birth of an entirely new asset class. This is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity.
Backing this asset class is a new technology. The capabilities of this new technology don’t just offer an order of magnitude difference from its’ predecessors; this technology enables categorically new possibilities, otherwise unobtainable capabilities. If you’re a tech company, consider a pitch for a data store technology with the following attributes:
- An append-only data stream with built-in rollup view of most recent state.
- Six-sigma reliability without dev-ops engineering costs.
- Pay-as-you-go, write-once, read-forever data.
- Native billing mechanisms that shift operational costs to the service beneficiary rather than the host. Imagine if your customers were willing and able to pay for your AWS Lambda function calls.
- Unprecedented RBAC controls over organizational data and credentials. Multi-signature schemes that can entirely negate the impact of phishing attacks. Access control rules down to row-level granularity without having to engineer your own data access layer.
- Universal RPC interface offering composability with thousands of applications. Your application won’t need to create an account on a hundred websites, you won’t need manage a half-dozen agreements for jdbc drivers, or integrate dozens of AWS products into a data pipeline.
Nothing is free of course. Whomever is making the call is paying for the ops cost for all of this, there will of course be developer friction learning yet another tech stack, and naturally there will still be the usual costs for interfaces and hosting any off-chain resources but there are many possibilities that are open for you when you have a direct payment channel to/from each of your users, a single source of truth you and your customers can agree to share without the usual counter-party risk that entails, and immediate access to dozens of financial functions that settle instantly.
These qualities enable 24-7 markets that can be accessed by anyone at any time for any reason, forgery-resistant supply chain tracking that spans national and company borders, legal attestation and identification systems with provably secure data releases not subject to custodial risk, and financially integrated applications that remove settlement times and national boundaries entirely. Connect directly with your customers without risking leaking their personal information, without an intermediary like Visa or Paypal adding friction and labyrinthine dispute resolution processes, and without having to worry about the legal landscape in each and every jurisdiction in the world. Integrate IoT devices without layer upon layer of architecture or the inter-company political risk of a middleman.
Everything mentioned above is available to you without having to buy anything more than the block space. I haven’t even mentioned a coin or token above. This isn’t a sales pitch for cryptocurrencies; you can use dollar equivalents at every level of your application if you choose and reap the benefits of this technology anyway.
These are features that are desirable regardless of what any government does or does not like. Regardless of how you feel about it, it is already here, and it’s not going away. If your company ignores this, your competitors will not. If your nation bans this, the productivity will just go overseas. There are tens of thousands active developers working on applications for the Ethereum Blockchain alone. Has any technology ever reached this degree of penetration and then quietly gone away? Does this chart look bearish to you?
If you’re just approaching this space from the fringes what you have probably heard about is an endless stream of hacks and scams. It’s true, there are multi-million dollar losses that occur on a seemingly weekly basis here. The finality guarantees mentioned above make fertile ground for attackers. It may surprise you then to hear that, culturally, this is the most optimistic group of people I have ever encountered. Despite the potential for misuse and the constant threat of attack, the opportunities so far outweigh the risks that people are positively brimming with excitement. Drop by a hackathon at a conference sometime, the energy is palpable.
Sometimes following this space feels like a frenzied land-grab in a new continent. We are thousands of ships exploring, surveying, and settling. There are riches aplenty for the taking but there are also dangers as with any uncharted territory. Tales of shipwrecks and piracy are common. Fear sells after all. The loudest tales though are of those who have struck gold or made a new village here. Every shipwreck just serves as a lesson to the next ships of the impending dangers. The bones of the ocean rising to greet new visitors. In the end though we are explorers and this is the frontier. We know the risks and we are here anyway.
On a final parting note, there is a term we have for the peculiar mental-state people assume when they investigate this space in earnest. They get “red-pilled”. You’ll commonly hear the phrase going down The Rabbit Hole. It’s surprisingly apt. Things you will learn here will make the mundane seem strange. We regularly engage in conversation on everything from philosophy and morality, to academic game theory and coordination/governance mechanisms, to financial primitives and the nature of money, to highly technical software architecture design. At some point on the journey you’ll look at the world and what used to be normal will look insane and corrupt. It’s a true looking-glass moment; you’ll never be the same after it.
My friend JT made a voiceover of this post and it was picked up and presented at the EY blockchain summit.