The DIY Submarine

A lot of us had some extra time at home this year, and a lot us took up new hobbies. A quick scan of a DIY forum or Reddit will show hundreds of newbies struggling with something that seemed so simple and accessible in theory, but in practice turned out to be far more complicated.

There are plenty of things you can make by yourself; furniture, clothes, even cars or boats. You can start from semi-finished parts or you can chose the path of a true artisan and start with the raw materials. Some do-it-yourself projects take only a few hours or days, while others may consume the better part of a lifetime. But there are some things that most people would probably agree are not a great idea to build yourself. For example…

Building your own sub?!

Recently, we came across an article about a man who built his own submarine. It took him over twenty years, and he apparently quite enjoyed the decades-long endeavor. While the maiden dive is yet to happen, let us be the first to wish him the best of luck when he finally does leave shore and take his glorified barrel out to sea. His example is especially amazing because a fully functioning submarine needs a lot of sophisticated parts, extremely good build quality, and be incredibly well designed. If not, you’re going to the bottom of the ocean and never coming up. Just like a spaceship — probably the hardest DIY project imaginable — you can’t just stop the engines if something goes wrong, and step outside to have a beer and contemplate how to make it better next time. There won’t be a next time.

Taking on Exceptional Challenges

For the individual, a quest like building a submarine is an exceptional challenge, the kind you don’t hear or read about too often. These kinds of projects are really only possible if time is no object. But someone’s spare time is their own; no accountant get’s to say how it’s spent.

For a company, it’s a different story entirely. You don’t spend decades making something from scratch that you could just buy or lease. If you plan to sell a service, say, inspecting the ocean floor, it’s much cheaper to just rent or buy a commercial submarine, do your job well, and focus on your business instead of trying to build the entire craft yourself from scratch. Pretty much every business case works this way. The Pizza delivery guy will rent or buy a car, not make his own from scratch; airline’s don’t start by building their own planes, they go to Boeing or Airbus. There are hundreds of other examples; this common sense approach to 1) stick to your area of expertise and 2) save time and money while increasing quality by going to the experts is the basis of most rational business decisions by mature companies, the basis of their economic survival.

Sometimes, however, we do see companies starting to work on their version of a ‘submarine.’ Maybe it seems like a good idea at the time, or they can’t find the right vehicle for their use case in the moment. In any case, they start to sink time and money into the treasure hunt of developing a base technology or product from scratch so that they can then start to do their job, when really all they want to do/should do is focus on their actual business.

DIY Blockchain is just as hard

One example of this can be seen in the blockchain sphere, beginning back in 2015, when the first programmable blockchain allowed developers to use the technology for their own solutions without having to first develop and launch an entirely new chain by themselves. The goal? A scalable, profitable blockchain business idea. Plenty of treasure hunters set off in what we refer to as the Wild West years of the ICO’s between 2015 and 2018. Sadly, only a very few of them ever found something of value. The treasure was never found, and some even doubt that it exists at all. But the metaphor about diving and submarines still holds water (sorry) because it is so unbelievably un-economical that, perhaps one day, people will read about it and shake their heads in disbelief.

Make Smart, Economical Choices

Everything is about resources. Startups normally start with a lean budget and then work to prove that their idea is economically feasible before they get real money from investors. That’s not what happened in the wild years of ICO’s and speculation. With the extreme price fluctuations of Bitcoin and Altcoins popping up everywhere, we saw two effects: 1) Bitcoin pioneers had pockets full of money, creating a new set of millionaires and billionaires; 2) the belief that blockchain was the next technological revolution and the fear of coming too late to the party saw many people throw their money at the silliest business ideas imaginable.

All these business ideas started basically from scratch, and all tried to reach more or less the same goal — to use the blockchain to make real things digital (tokenize them) and then trade them. This process is actually pretty comparable to building your own submarine, because it is not something you can do over night, especially not if the end result is to dive into the deep and dangerous waters of the financial market.

What dangers lurk in the deep?

You might think we are stretching the metaphor here, but Blockchain technology truly is dangerous waters. It’s a deep ocean full of unknowns. Despite what salesmen may tell you, it’s an undeniable fact that this technology is still far from maturity. The craft you build today to explore tokenization on one chain might be totally useless, all that effort wasted, if one day we see a totally different blockchain come to prominence. That is, unless you factor the fickle nature of technological progress into your solution; but then that makes the development process all the more expensive. Generic approaches have always been the most costly ones in IT history.

There are also sharks out there; for example, idea-snatchers are common. While you’re still planning and working on your submarine, you will have to tell others about it, perhaps to court funding or attract talent to your team. One way or another your ideas will leak out. Then, before you can get your submarine together, the sharks are there, looting your treasure.

There are also reefs out there that can sink your project, technological “unknowns” you may crash into. From a technical perspective, tokenization is really not as simple as many might think.

Other dangers lie in the form of hacks and bugs, the common risks of new, yet-to-be standardized tech. As in every other example we’ve mentioned, it’s better to take a craft that has already seen many successful dives rather than using a completely new one that has yet to dive at all. Ultimately, it’s less about getting in the water than it is about coming up again, alive and in one piece.

You don’t need to go it alone

For blockchain or token economy ‘submarines,’ you don’t have to do it yourself. In fact, in pretty much every way, it’s better to work with an expert. You save time, you save money, and you get to work with professionals who’s sole job is to support your project.

CoreLedger’s mission is to make blockchain adoption as easy and affordable as possible. We make building your token economy solution a simple, pleasant experience with our Active Sandbox and white label suite, and can adapt and scale to just about any blockchain use case. Click here for more information, or get right in touch with us.