Crypto is dead! Or is it?
By Suirelav on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
Freedom
In essence Bitcoin and all of its intellectual offspring are about empowering people, giving them freedom and choices. Without having to trust intermediaries or centralized entities with a lot of power it suddenly gives them real autonomy. Mankind is not used to this new form of freedom though. Centuries and generations have passed where we’ve grown accustomed to either trusting centralized entities (in most democracies) or having no choice, being forced to trust, so to speak.
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has changed all that, or better said, promises to change all that. So far it looks like we’ve fallen in the same kind of trap as the first car manufacturers after the invention of the steam engine. We’re building motorized horse carriages that cost 100x as much as a horse and draw the conclusion that this technology must be totally useless.
Expectations
The Gartner hype cycle is pretty accurate for most new technologies. We tend to overestimate their impact in the short term and start complaining once the hype dies down that nothing has changed. But we severely underestimate their long term impact. Humans are just not so good at predicting the future.
We are also social beings and we rather trust people than new technology. Driverless planes, trains and automobiles are technologically possible but that doesn’t mean we should embrace them. In fact, we don’t. The same goes for DLT, “be your own bank” sounds like a nice slogan but most of us rather have somebody else be our bank.
Choke points
No wonder then that human behaviour shows through in the current state of the crypto sphere. We have technology which enables us to trustlessly transact peer to peer, yet we choose to use centralised exchanges and donate our hashing power to a pool, trusting them to distribute the rewards fairly. It’s quite ironic because most of these institutions we trust in crypto nowadays have almost no regulation and can much more easily scam you than the banks we’re trying to replace.
Maybe it will take a generation or two before we are used to having the responsibility over our own money and assets, or maybe we just don’t want to and some new form of custodians will emerge.
Usability
What we can learn from the evolution of the internet since the early nineties is that it just takes a lot time before ideas are turned into actual usable products. For everyday people, not just geeks. Many people have drawn this parallel already but that’s because it’s the most recent technological and social revolution that most of us have experienced ourselves. You could also compare it with electricity or railroads and you’ll see a lot of similarities as well.
Fast forward
So is there anything we can do to speed up this process or do we have to let history do its job and just wait and see what’s going to happen? There’s definitely some things we can do to improve our chances of a ‘breakthrough’: an app or technological advancement that will help us cross the chasm from early adopters into more mainstream users.
It will most likely come down to luck though, or serendipity if you will. And luck is a large numbers game, the more people experimenting with something the higher the chances are that they will come up with something useful. So we have to lend lady luck a helping hand by creating an environment in which it is super easy to contribute and experiment. If we do that then we have a chance to beat the odds and fast forward into a future where people will actually benefit from this technological breakthrough.
Back to reality
Decentralization is not strong enough of an incentive for people to switch from highly polished ultra usable apps to cumbersome flaky ones so it is up to all of us to try to make our apps compete on the user experience level and let decentralization be the cherry on top of the cake instead of the sour grape it is at the moment.
This will be a lot of hard work, but through perseverance I’m positive we will succeed. Once people realise that they can actually take power back from the big institutions and experience the benefits of real freedom and true ownership without having to compromise on usability and security the real revolution will begin. It’s up to all of us to make that day happen. Personally, I can’t wait!
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