Blockchain is a new frontier, a new democratising horizon. Stop seeing it as a gimmick.

John Durrant
Sep 3, 2018 · 4 min read

I’ve recently returned from a hiking trip by myself along the Pembrokeshire coastline. It provided a lot of thinking time. One thing I pondered was my desire to commit fully, to go all-in, into the Blockchain domain. Hiking is a great way to think. Unencumbered by distractions and the claustrophobia of modern life. Taking hypnotic steps, one after the other, seems to set up a rhythm to let your brain run wild. The philosopher Nietzsche used to walk daily for hours in the mountains before putting pen to paper. Hiking opens your mind to new horizons, and for me the future horizon is immersing myself in Blockchain technology and applying its democratising power to create new opportunities for people and society.

Pembrokeshire Coastal Path, August 2018

Blockchain is revolutionary. It’s arguably the most interesting and exciting thing to happen in tech since the birth of the internet. It allows anyone, without needing to ask for permission, to create their own financial eco-system, programmable money, programmable monetary policy, which can scale instantly to do international cross-border payments without any centralised control or the need to go through third parties. The network doesn’t care who the sender or receiver is, or the value of the transaction, there is no censorship and there is no hierarchy. You are treated the same whether you live in the 3rd world with no access to traditional financial services, or whether you’re a 1st world billionaire. It provides a truly democratising, neutral network, where mathematical and cryptographic rules are enforced to process transactions and secure the network.

Money as Technology:

Money is a technology, as old as civilisation itself, and technology always evolves. There are over 200 traditional ‘national’ currencies of the world. Issued and controlled by governments and the banking systems. None of them can do any of this. Credit cards and other payment systems are not built for the Internet age, Blockchain tech is an evolution in the technology of money. If a technology is faster, more secure, more flexible, more accessible, and cheaper — then profit seeking opportunists will make its adoption inevitable. It’s not a case of ‘if’, but ‘when’.

Money is the first application of this disruptive technology, and through Smart Contracts and other innovations we are putting the power to disrupt every domain into the hands of entrepreneurs and ordinary people with the ability to program a computer. The technology is a framework, a protocol, to allow code to be processed on decentralised systems in a reliable way. This means that many of the services traditionally performed by third parties can be completely removed from the process, giving rise to the term ‘dis-intermediation’. In money it dis-intermediates payments services like Visa and the banking system, but in other industries there is the potential to dis-intermediate a whole range services, from the removal of legal intervention in ownership of assets, and asset transfer, to the transparency and efficient remittances of supply chains, as well as the opening up of entirely new markets through the possibility of cost-free micropayments processing. No field of industry or government is immune to innovative disruption.

It’s not a gimmick or a silly fad:

Companies still see the technology as a gimmick, as a toy or a fad. Something to keep on the back-burner and take a ‘wait and see’ approach. People are still skeptical. Often when you stand-up and talk about Blockchain, people will still chuckle and mock. They’ll point to scalability problems without understanding the trade-off between scalability, decentralisation and security. They’ll still point to the criminal uses of the technology — come on, that’s not an argument, bank robbers use cars, cars kill people, but that doesn’t stop you from driving. They’ll point to price volatility, hacks, and a horrible user experience when onboarding/offboarding to the technology. Of course there are still problems to be solved. It’s all heavy on theory and still weak in many areas of implementation. But these problems are solvable, and the implementation will go through peaks, troughs, and plateaus before eventual widespread adoption.

Ignoring the technology, being cynical or being tentative about it, is akin to burying your head in the sand. Companies should be developing a Blockchain strategy. They should be training themselves, learning and understanding this completely new paradigm. They should be looking at how their own business could be disrupted by ‘new kids on the block’ doing what they do more democratically, more openly, more transparently, more securely, more cheaply, more flexibly, more accessibly, and eventually faster. Their solutions will cut through your slow, cumbersome, clunky, expensive, complicated, inflexible solutions and systems and pose an existential threat to your business.

Frontier mindset:

Blockchain is a new frontier opening up, it serves the mindset which wants to broaden horizons, explore possibilities. In our traditional companies we often suffocate innovation through our slow-to-respond conservative job titles, pigeon-holing people into roles and hierarchies. We need to identify those people with the pioneering mindset, train them up, and set them free to ponder, dabble, and potentially come up with something revolutionary.

What is your Blockchain strategy? Do you have one? Are you training and mentoring your people in this new paradigm? Are you innovating? Are you monitoring threats? Are you thinking about opportunities? Or are you just burying your head in the sand and scoffing when people start mentioning Blockchain?

Companies need to adopt the frontier mindset, broaden their horizons, and make the effort to really understand what this exciting new disruptive technology means to their ongoing existence.

John Durrant

Written by

Musing on the everyday use of blockchains and cryptocurrencies by everyday people…

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