It’s early days — here’s why
It’s very common to see proponents of blockchain/crypto/web3 technology talk about how it’ll completely change how the world deals with money.
However, for most people today, it’s very difficult for them to connect their current experience with crypto to these proclamations of world upending greatness. It’s quite understandable that people faced with confusing UX, esoteric technical language, high transaction fees etc won’t believe that this is the future.
My goal with this essay is to bridge that gap for the curious [unbeliever], using history & my knowledge of how computers work.
Let’s talk about the things you use today
If you’re reading this, you’re likely doing so on an Internet connected smartphone or computer. This device lets you open up your browser (or the Medium app) & read something written by someone thousands of miles away that you’ve likely never met.
To do this, you probably just tapped link on your screen, waited a second and like magic — words filled up your screen. There are many daily magical experiences like this that we eventually take for granted — things like video calling, group chats, competitive FPL leagues. When you tap your screen — numerous complicated things happen in the background that involve many technologies & protocols like DNS, TCP/IP, VoIP, HTTP etc.
I think the word “numerous” is a HUGE understatement. Here is a ~2700 word blog post that explains what happens when you type a URL into your browser. This somewhat technical article is actually a simplified summary, for all intents and purposes. To fully understand all the different digital technologies that power our daily experiences — you’d need to make it your entire career & live for a ridiculously long time. If you want to learn more about these protocols, I think this is a good place to start.
In any case, we’re very fortunate in that understanding any of these things isn’t a requirement to benefit from the technology, all you need to do is tap your phone. Using Internet enabled technology wasn’t always this straightforward. There was a time you’d actually need to know what an IP address was to use the Internet.
The early days of the Internet
Before web browsers & the “world wide web” as we know it today — accessing the “Internet” was done via multiple protocols. There were protocols for communication like email, usenet, irc & protocols for file sharing like FTP, Gopher. In order to use these, you’d have to interact with different clients (essentially different software) that were mostly text based.
In 1989, using the email protocol was done entirely via a command-line interface.
Email attachments weren’t a thing until around 1994. Prior to that:
“it was possible to send binary files in e-mails, but it was a very laborious process, in my experience. You could use a program called uuencode, and then merge the encoded file into the e-mail you wanted to send. You could type out your message using an editor, like vi, or an echo command piped into a file, uuencode the file you wanted to send with it, concatenate the two, and send it.” — Mark Miller from Quora.
Having to interface with multiple protocols & clients to have a relatively well rounded experience of the Internet is very similar to where humanity currently is with blockchain technology. Most of it isn’t user friendly for most people. Most things sound like technical gibberish. For most people, it’s very difficult to see how these things come together to completely transform human life as we know it.
Getting to the Internet of today took years, many hard-working people & innumerable technological advancements built on top of, or by learning from those that came before.
We now have the Internet
I love this quote from a 2009 post in the Guardian by Oliver Burkeman. He was referring to what came after the day “the Internet was invented”.
“To say that the rest is history is the emptiest of cliches — but trying to express the magnitude of what began that day, and what has happened in the decades since, is an undertaking that quickly exposes the limits of language.”
So much has changed since then but I want to focus on how building software has evolved since the pre-Internet days.
Back then, creating the protocols & software that powers all of this was done by a relatively small number of people. Getting (early) users to test run your new awesome technology was more difficult at the time. Iteration was slower. Commentary (especially about implementation details) was likely happening in less accessible spaces, with far less people. They didn’t have the Internet.
Today, it has become commonplace for hundreds of people who have never met each other to contribute to the development of a new protocol that solves a specific problem.
- You can quickly start a new project from scratch, or build upon the work of others thanks to the ubiquity of & improvements to open source software development.
- You can publish your thoughts about the direction you want to take this implementation & have thousands of people give solicited & unsolicited opinions about it almost immediately.
- You can enlist teammates, solicit funding, push software updates to millions of early users with far more ease & speed.
- Exponentially more human beings than ever before have the ability to partake in the creation, usage & commentary of new digital technology.
This explains, in part, why there’s so much activity and brouhaha in the crypto/web3 space today. There are so many variant protocols, products, so many tweets, articles, apps etc because millions of human beings are connected in ways that simply didn’t exist when the Internet was still in it’s infancy.
Personally, I think the involvement of more human beings from all over the world is a good thing for the development of the industry/space. That way we get more ideas & experiments, the ability to build faster than ever before and solutions that cater to more people.
There are still many problems to solve in order for billions of people to benefit from this technology. I prefer to see those problems as opportunities as opposed to deterrents.
Hopefully, you do too.
