An event horizon is “a theoretical boundary around a black hole beyond which no light or other radiation can escape.” From inside the event horizon, everything seems totally fine, except for the fact that you are being stretched out into an infinitely long spaghetti noodle.
Futurists predict that at some point, the pace of technological advancement will increase so rapidly, that the entire world will be permanently and irreversibly altered. This has been referred to as the technological singularity.
Ray Kurzweil explains this process through his Law of Accelerating Returns.
The rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems (including but not limited to the growth of technologies) tends to increase exponentially.
Indeed, these trends do seem to be playing out before our eyes in a number of ways. Let’s start with technological adoption.
While we’re adopting technology quicker, it’s also getting exponentially faster over the last 100 years or more.
At a certain point, the changes start coming so quickly that humans simply can’t keep up with it all. Have you ever had that feeling? Today it’s hard enough, if not impossible to keep up with changes in a single field, let alone the world at large.
If you happened to be living in a society that was on the brink of being sucked into a technological singularity, how would you know?
Today I’m going to present evidence of this singularity within a single field, that of blockchain technology. I will argue that we are in the midst of a technological revolution, and demonstrate that the blockchain genie has already escaped its bottle.
It started with Bitcoin, but now it’s so much more than that.
Don’t get me wrong, Bitcoin is still relevant. In fact, Bitcoin still drives the cryptocurrency markets. But, today we’re going to talk about some of the amazing things going on in the blockchain space that go beyond Bitcoin into so many other facets of the world. Bitcoin is a part of this, but it’s no longer the only part.
I’ve been obsessed with crypto for a few years now. I’ve spent so much time and energy on the subject; and yet what I know now is only a tiny fraction of the information, of the knowledge, of the expertise in the space.
Recently, someone shared a link of a Tweet Storm sent out by Joseph Lubin, an Ethereum co-founder. I started reading through it and I realized just how shallow my knowledge of the space was. In fact, a large portion of what we’re going to talk about today are things he mentioned in his Tweet. I found this information so dense, that I wanted to unpack it and talk about what exactly is going on here, and what it means.
First, let’s talk about the growth of the Ethereum ecosystem. You may be wondering why I use the word “ecosystem” to describe groups of people and technology. This is intentional, I actually see software systems as primitive life forms. Just like memes, or viruses, they change, grow, spread, or they evolve, or they die. They can replicate, they have an environment, the parallels to organic life are uncanny. Heck, software projects can even share code. Isn’t code kind of like DNA, a set of instructions that builds something and can be replicated, or even replicate itself? I digress.
Dapps are decentralized, or distributed applications that run on the blockchain. Decentralized applications were around before the blockchain (such as BitTorrent), but for the purpose of this conversation, let’s focus on the ones running on the blockchain.
Many have complained about the modest adoption of Dapps, wondering when the next “killer app” is going to come to the market. Well, nobody really knows which Dapp is going to take off, but one thing we do know is that the number of Dapps that exist is growing like crazy. That number is growing despite the market conditions, it’s growing despite low adoption, high fees, network congestion and actions taken by the SEC.
Dapps are fundamentally software systems, so data that comes from the code itself, and from frameworks around the code could be valuable leading indicators of what’s coming down the pipe. You might think of this like decentralized R&D.
One of the most popular gateways to the Ethereum blockchain and the IPFS is called Infura. Infura is reporting 10B+ requests per day. This number is insanely huge.
For those of you wondering how this stacks up against other services, Google reports that it handles 3.5B searches per day, and Twitter reports only 500M Tweets per day.
A popular Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Ethereum, called Truffle, is showing constant growth over the last year despite the bear market. Additionally, the number of unique addresses in the Ethereum network has shown constant growth in log scale.
But, it’s not just Ethereum that’s experiencing this rapid growth. Bitcoin is too, in a number of ways. First, let’s look at the Lightning Network, which just launched this year.
This is a log scale trend mi amigos. The Lightning Network is growing rapidly, but it still only accounts for a tiny portion of the traffic happening on the Bitcoin blockchain. Let’s check out the base layer and see how that’s performing.
While layer two solutions are being built out, that clunky sewer rat, the Bitcoin blockchain has been evolving. The number of transactions processed on chain has increased by orders of magnitude.
While the number of transactions processed per month has been increasing again since March, the average fee has plummeted.
The Bitcoin network is now processing around 250k transactions a day for less than $0.40, when earlier this year the fees at this activity level was between $10–$20. How’s that for an upgrade?
The Impact
I could show you all the charts in the world, but at a certain point this becomes less interesting. I want to shift now and talk about how this tiny piece of the technological singularity is impacting the world directly.
Did you know that the Israeli government is using blockchain technology to encrypt messages? Did you know that Estonia is putting health care and ID on the blockchain? Were you aware that Dubai has launched an initiative to become the first city entirely powered by blockchain by 2020?
Around the globe, blockchain is starting to change everything from accounting, banking supply chain, you name it. South Africa’s central bank is getting in on the action. Earnst & Young has launched a private blockchain platform based on the Ethereum platform. ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil and gas company is looking into using blockchain for its Speedpass+ app. Procter and Gamble is experimenting with blockchain proxy voting.
Blockchain was listed as one of the top 10 healthcare innovations for 2019, with none other than Glaxo-Smith Klein getting involved. Networks of rural banks in the Philippines are running blockchain pilot programs. In Chile, energy networks are being moved onto the blockchain.
Lest you think it’s all about driving profit to the bottom line, consider the following initiatives aimed at bettering the world. Project Bifrost is connecting aid workers to those in need using a blockchain solution that cuts out middlemen, speeds up the process and limits fees to 1%. Civic, Onename and ShoCard are working to use blockchain to put identity on the blockchain, helping those without a way to prove who they are to access vital services and enforce their rights.
Lastly, a project called Hala Systems is working to combine AI, blockchain, social media, and embedded smart devices to create early warning systems for people threatened by natural disasters or conflict.
Conclusion
The technological singularity is not a theory, it’s happening right now. We are living in it. Technology is speeding up and converging. I contend that blockchain is one of the key foci at this moment in time.
Blockchain technology is strange enough and powerful enough to change the world. That’s why I’m involved.
