Why Blockchain is a Hammer Looking for a Nail and Where it Might Find it
I’m Here to Tell you What Most People Won’t
Your project almost definitely won’t benefit, even 1%, from choosing to use Blockchain. You’re not using it for anything innovative that a centralized Oracle database couldn’t do twenty years ago. That’s what the posturing Blockchain influencers and engineers looking to make a quick buck fail to share. They’re doing absolutely nothing which is new or innovative.
What you’re doing is building a vanity project which strokes your own ego.You’re not using blockchain technology because you have to, you’re using it because you want to and think that it will impress other people. That’s sad.
The same is almost universally true for AI and Machine learning by the way. Both have rotted to become empty adjectives used to describe functions which have no characteristics of either. They amount to little more than fancy parlor tricks involving automated bots which act in a very small, specific niche.
The sad reality is that we live in the replication age, the desires to innovate are nowhere to be found. Instead, people focus mindlessly on the replication of the existing. They take what use in their analog world and espouse about how their imagination of this thing recreated for a digital decentralized age will change the world. Sure, it might sound impressive but when you analyze the details…
There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what decentralization even is, its purpose and why it would ever be a means to an end. Without understanding that in first principles we are sentenced to repeat the mistakes of the past. Much like the dot com explosion, crypto and Blockchain will encounter its own reckoning and it is fast approaching. It becomes so difficult to see the wood for the trees that absolutely everything you encounter either looks revolutionary or like a dumpster fire about to REKT the universe.
You Thought the Crash of 2018 was it?
Not even close. That was, in fact, public sentiment running wild and had next to no bearing on the investment or innovation in the space. Yes, ICO’s were an investment but not in the way that it typically matters, i.e. the money raised came from the pockets of ‘unsophisticated investors’ (not a term I used fondly but apt for this purpose).
That meant that these projects were white elephants funded on nothing but sketches on the back of a fag packet.
There was no diligence done on any of them and they raised capital on a white paper. Rather than focussing on things that were real and already had working prototypes, the focus drifted to nothing but financial reward. As it turns out, greed as an incentive to participate is an unlikely route to oversized returns.
Institutional capital certainly has its faults, but for the most part, it can be relied upon to fund projects which conform to a very specific set of expectations. This in no way guarantees their success, or that the investments made are to people who reflect the range of diversity in the world, but their diligence on investments fall somewhere above a whim and a prayer.
And that is a great pity. We focussed on the low hanging fruits, which is typically fine when focussing on such novel technology, but on this occasion, it turned out that they were rotten. The low hanging fruits weren’t sweet.
The solution then is to demand better and develop honesty. It’s about ensuring we act with integrity rather than ego. It’s about being braver and bolder and embracing the possibility of failure in the hopes or arriving at a far more exciting destination.
Are you recreating the wheel? If so, use the wheel that already exists.
Don’t let your ego lead to compounding misery like so much of the projects that exploded and have now crashed and burned.
Blockchains promise is clear. It could enable trust in a trustless world. A final solution to the ephemeral problem of the Byzantine general. Where intermediaries have historically been required to ensure trust, technology can first reduce our reliance before rendering them completely unnecessary.
That means Airbnb without the need for the platform to take a cut of your profits. It means Uber without the faceless shark that everyone seems to hate.
Blockchain’s killer app hasn’t been invented yet.
That’s because of human greed and individual selfishness. Rather than building the impossible, we shirk the responsibility and take the easy route.
The brutal truth of blockchain is that, like Thor’s hammer, few are worthy to wield its power.
