Technology takes a long time to develop. Today we are incredibly impatient. It will take years for this technology to reach its full potential.
The main mote in the eye of this article is an inability to see a use for distributed trust mechanisms and an overwhelming belief in centralized trust systems. This is a major blind spot that I encourage you to rethink. It’s not that there is no use for centralized trust it’s just that it’s not the only kind and it can and often does fail us. Decentralized, distributed consensus mechanisms can fix that for many organizations and technologies.
Distributed trust is the foundation of the US Constitution. Instead of centralizing power in the hands of a single person or group, they distributed it with checks and balances. They did this because they saw the failure of putting all the power in the hands of a few. This single insight was the very foundation of the the rise of the United States to world power. It worked for two hundred years and is only beginning to fail us now. Without it you have a monarchy or an abuse of power. How do I know? See every other nation on Earth before the US at the time. Centralized power, strangled growth and limited ability to innovate.
We see countless examples today of centralized trust failing us. The problem is that you view trust as a fixed concept when, in fact, it’s constantly in motion. If a man is faithful to his wife for years and then cheats on her all that trust is burned up overnight. The same is true of institutions. Take a look at Equifax. They couldn’t keep their data safe and yet we are stuck with them as a centralized trusted power. There is no way to remove them. We know they are untrustworthy and yet they still have all our data and remain a “trusted’ third party. With a distributed consensus mechanism we could remove them and mark them as no longer trusted.
Look around you today and you’ll see endless instances of how centralized trust is easily abused. Want to gut a government organization? Simply staff it with people who believe in the exact opposite of its mission and watch it fall apart, as all the people who once formed its bedrock leave in disgust. We are seeing this right now with countless US organizations. There is no way to replace that trusted organization. We are just screwed.
Or simply take a look at the data breaches that happen on a daily basis to nearly every single company on Earth. There really is no major company or governmental organization that has not suffered a data breach and still we look to these organizations as trusted arbiters of our biometric and personal data. Why? Stockholm syndrome is probably the only explanation. The other is that we simply had no alternative.
Until now.
Decentralized trust mechanisms can and will change how this works.
Think of it like this. If five banks have the keys to a ledger they can change the rules arbitrarily. But if the banks, the regulators, the depositors and the shareholders all hold a stake and a vote in the ledger, which rules get enacted? Who do you think will make better decisions?
The answer is obvious: The group that holds all the cards will make decisions that benefit only them while the decentralized consensus system will make decisions that have to take into account the welfare of the whole system.
When the banks hold the keys only the rules that benefit them alone will be enacted. This is not a conspiracy. This is just basic fact. When an entity achieves dominance over other entities it uses and abuses that advantage in any way it can.
You are also mistaking current performance levels of the technology for future performance levels. Sure centralized, cloud based and SaaS services have a performance and scale advantage. They’ve been at it for *30 years.* You are talking about decentralized consensus as if it’s thirty years old, when it is only eight years old. That’s just absurd. Of course centralized tech has the advantage now. But lots of money and brain power is being poured into the complex challenges of distributed scaling. It can and will be solved.
Think about every single technology powering the world today. TV had one or two channels in the 1950s. The Internet was joke to people in the 1990’s, just for nerds. AI would never become anything but a toy from the 1970’s to the 2000's. For thirty years, AI did absolutely nothing. Super easy to dismiss it. Now it powers everything from image recognition to self-driving cars. Digital book readers weren’t as good as regular books. Solar panels couldn’t capture enough light. A car would never outperform horses. They were slow and lacked grace.
How did every single one of these work out? In fact, I challenge you to come up with a serious technology that actually failed. Go ahead. Look back in time and point out even a handful of technologies that had this much brain power and investment behind it that really failed in all the ways you say distributed ledgers will fail. You won’t find many. In fact you probably won’t find almost any.
All of them went through fits and starts and performance problems. All of them had dramatic failures and I told you so pundits saying it will never work. All of them had products that didn’t quite do everything we wanted them to do. Then suddenly out of nowhere comes the Kindle and everyone believes that eBooks can work.
That’s how innovation works. It is slow. It takes time. It has to overcome doubters and people who dismiss it and say it will never work. But slowly, inevitably, like water wearing down stones at a beach, the tide overcomes. This is the way of all things.
I am not sure whether it will take two years or ten for this technology to really come into its own but it will come into its own. It will not look like what we have today. It’ll have solved for all of the problems you point out (usability and stability and scaling) and then some. It will do all that and provide brand new features you can’t live without. And at that point your article will look a lot this famous Newsweek article, “The Internet Bah!” that predicted the utter and total failure of the Internet about two years before it really took off.
