A power shuffle for the 2020s
The new decade comes with a technology power shuffle. Gone is Deep Learning¹, which hit the buffers a good year ago. Whilst the band is still playing, its seemingly relentless journey into our lives will be continued only by befriending something altogether different. Driving that change² may be one of the true stars of the 20s: blockchain. Blockchain is all about gluing lots of individual contributions together without having to argue about which bits are where and in what order. Nobody has a list of these things that’s any more important than anybody else’s, and the whizz-bang technology driving blockchain provides a way of reaching consensus as to what goes on that list without it turning into a fight.
From an outsider’s perspective, it’s easy to believe that blockchain is only about crypto-currencies and digital money, but that does it a huge disservice. There are those, either deliberately or through ignorance, who focus on this one application — money — and value it above and to the exclusion of all other applications. Usually, but not always, the target for these affections is bitcoin. This is a mistake.
Blockchain: A foundation piece for the future
When you look at what blockchain does, delivering self-service trust and a shared, growing global state, it starts to look like a tool for almost everything. Even more so, when you consider the built-in incentive scheme makes it more profitable to play nice than not. Restricting this to digital money misses the point. It applies to all forms of value exchange, and drives the ability to intelligently connect value providers, many of which are currently incredibly wasteful. Take IoT devices: utilisation is poor, devices are incompatible, insecure and they cannot talk to each other in a common language. At present, there is no incentive for fixing any of this. While everyone is finding elaborate new metaphors for just how much electricity is burnt shaking the dice for bitcoin’s proof-of-work (a consensus mechanism that’ll be gone soon, having long since been improved on), they’re missing the irony that it may well be bitcoin’s underlying innovation — the blockchain itself — that provides the most dramatic saving of energy that technology has ever delivered short of switching it all off.
Blockchain is the foundation piece, the cornerstone, the very fabric that allows the world’s things to find each other, talk to each other and transact on a private, scaleable network where nobody needs to believe anyone in order to trust what’s going on. The decentralised incentives that make it a no-brainer to connect knowledge, data sources and things to such networks also deliver the power and collective intelligence to make it work. Now, we can bring the individual components of the economy to life, in a world that is owned by all its users, that adapts in real time to bring everyone together, free of borders, restrictions and centralised control. Business can get done.
Blockchain technology isn’t just a more efficient way to settle securities. It will fundamentally change market structures, and maybe even the architecture of the Internet itself.
— Abigail Johnson (CEO of Fidelity Investments)
There’s a long way to go. We’re all familiar with the annual rolling out of the “this year will be the year of the Linux desktop” phrase. The smiles brought on by this betray an underlying issue: like Linux, blockchain and its surrounding technologies are hard, and decentralisation comes without the support and attention to detail that mere mortals need. The technology and its benefits are challenging to understand, and can appear unwelcoming and frightening. If this slammed-door approach continues, we collectively stand to lose a lot: and for those of us who understand the potential of decentralisation, it’s grim to watch centralisation of blockchain ooze into place in front of our very eyes.
Technology that wants to be needed, and needs to be wanted
Part of the blockchain adoption problem is the community’s continued bafflement when other people don’t get it. It’s all well and good to say that bitcoin and blockchain let you be your own bank and control your own identity, but not everyone wants that responsibility, or understands why that’s better than what they already have. Do you want to be your own hospital? Fire station? No, you do not. Good technology is just there. It’s in the background, invisible, it has safety nets and it helps you get things done better than if it was not there. Blockchain can and should be able to provide this, because delivering properly incentivised disintermediation resets the Internet back to where it was: decentralised, with value and power pushed to you, rather than a rapidly shrinking number of increasingly vast corporations. It’s the thing that lets us operate at scale, eliminate wastage by fully utilising the value around us, and it is the perfect partner for machine intelligence and learning — a collective intelligence owned by everyone, for the benefit of everyone.
Of course, blockchain’s public relations have not always been, um… spectacular. Between the OneCoins of this world, horror-show ICOs and general in-fighting, it’s a fair observation that decentralisation may bring trust, stability and agreement to a global data structure, but may not deliver a stellar marketing campaign. In spite of this, blockchain has long since been embraced by businesses, finding its way into supply chains, finance, asset management and so much more. The corporate world needs professional support and proper service-level contracts: they want someone to call when it goes wrong. For everyone else, we want ease-of-use, interoperability and a more mature space that recognises that innovation didn’t begin and end with Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 bitcoin paper. We’re at the start of something far grander that will touch all of our lives: life is no longer a zero-sum game — it’s a dynamic, building-block based economy that adapts in real time to suit a changing world.
So welcome to the new decade, where companies such as Fetch.ai are combining technologies like autonomous agents, blockchain and AI to decentralise how we extract value from the world around us. No data, device, service, person or knowledge will go unused or unappreciated: a fitting combination of technology that’s kinder to the environment, and provides each and every one of us something we’ve had cleverly eased out of us over the past decade: ownership of ourselves and our stuff. The future may not have delivered holidays on the moon or flying cars, but it has delivered something even cooler: it has made co-operation and sharing pay.
First published by City AM’s Crypto Insider in Crypto AM on 7th January 2020
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[1] Although, as a friend and colleague pointed out the other day, some are creatively redefining what falls under the umbrella of “Deep Learning” to overlap with more and more. At its current rate, by 2024, all software from “Hello World” upwards will be deep learning, it seems.
[2] Blockchain is one of the things driving the change, but not the only one. A little birdie tells me something else is just around the corner, too.
