If you doubt crypto’s future, the past is here to correct you

Detractors continue to let fly their arrows at blockchain and cryptocurrency, despite all the evidence the technology can have an enormous effect on the way we live, the way we do business, the way we respond to disasters, and the way we maintain security over accounts and identities.

They point to a lack of central authority (one of blockchain’s key selling points) as a detriment, working from the POV that a police force is a necessity. They point to the cost of scaling and maintaining the block in thousands of nodes. And the power. Holy jeez, all those terawatt hours. One analyst has said the traffic, ultimately, would grind the internet to a halt. “Rat poison squared,” declared Warren Buffett.

But here’s a question: think back through history. When, ever, has any advanced technology been rejected in favor of older methods? It simply doesn’t happen.

A short history of man-made achievement

We all know that staying up too late is bad for us. We should get more sleep. But we’ve been using artificial illumination since 500 B.C. when China transported volcanic gas through bamboo pipes to provide a fuel for streetlights. Candles, oil lamps, light bulbs all followed — all in service of fighting our fear of the dark.

Alexander Winston was a bicycle manufacturer in 1897 when he sold the first gasoline-powered car in the U.S. (Others were experimenting, but Winston would record the first sale.) Later he recalled how ridiculed he was at the time. “To advocate replacing the horse, which had served man through centuries, marked one as an imbecile.”

Technology’s great inquisitor

In the 1970s, a man named Gerry Mander (I looked it up) wrote the book “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.” His biggest issue was that it does a lousy job of representing what is a complex world, and in a variety of ways threatens our health and the world around us. About 15 years later, he expanded his argument by analyzing a range of technological advances and determining they can lead to disasters, financial ruin, a life adrift of anything sacred, and the spread of disease, leaving us swirling in a cyclone of political and technical chaos. He included computers, communications, the exploration of space, even corporations in his list of culprits poisoning us. Mander is a serious and careful author, who recently argued that capitalism is a lousy way to build an economy. And he’s probably right about the unplanned effects of technology. But here we are, viewing more content than ever and with our hands on the tiller of every technology he decries, pushing it to the max.

A famed prediction in Newsweek Magazine back in 1995 said the web would never replace print media for news, and a computer network could never change how government works. In less than two decades, Newsweek became an online-only publication, and thanks to what happened on our computer networks we are dealing globally with the political ramifications.

One last example — while Napster in its original form shut down in 2001, the digital music revolution was the winner over what had preceded it.

We love genies. We don’t WANT them back in the bottle.

We have no idea today whether Bitcoin is the Napster of digital currency. But we do know this: a monetary system that is purely digital, on a distributed and cryptographically secured ledger, will allow us to move money with fewer unexplainable delays, without borders, without extraordinary costs, without the arbitrary caprice and whim of third parties, and with enhanced security.

Rat poison squared it might be. But it is here to stay.

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