Blockchain and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
In 1993, if you had told someone that the internet will make information accessible for everyone and wipe away a class of individuals called experts, it would have been most likely called a socialist, utopian dream. If you tell someone today that Blockchain and cryptocurrency will change the structure of finance and value, you wouldn't probably get a different answer.
Bitcoin was born because the internet in its present form had seized to become sufficient enough.
In Thomas Kuhn’s remarkable book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he talks about what triggers a scientific discovery that completely tilts a field on it’s head (such as the discovery of oxygen in chemistry, Newton’s laws in physics):
Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e, with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science
In case of Bitcoin, the existing paradigm was the internet and the protocols it governed by. What are the possible anomalies of the paradigms of the internet that lead to the creation of Bitcoin:
- Information can be transacted, but not actual value
- We have a digital version of ourselves on the internet, but it is incomplete, fragmented and controlled by third parties
- We still rely on offline financial institutions to verify and validate transaction of value on the internet
Blockchain and Bitcoin gives us the means to transact value over the internet without the need of a third party to establish trust. It also helps make digital, crucial parts of the what Yuval Noah Harari calls the cognitive revolution.
The cognitive revolution started when humans began to live in a dual reality — The objective reality of the environment we lived in and the imagined reality of gods, religion, money, corporations and governments, entities that exist only in our mind. According to Harari, it is this ability to believe in a collective imagined reality that has helped Homo Sapiens thrive.
Arguably, the most successful imagined realities are money and organisation (groups, companies, non-profits, political parties, countries, united nations). The present internet does not have the means to make completely digital either of these. Blockchain and a cryptocurrency gives us the ability to make these powerful imagined realities digital. Future billion dollar corporations will exist in the hive mind, unshackled from lawyers and banks, who’s only real value seems to be validating transactions.
Two examples of how Blockchain and cryptocurrency is already doing this:
Colony: Colony works like a company. Each colony has its own tokens and individuals who work for the colony will get assigned tokens based on the work they do. It is an organisation that exists completely on the internet.
Blockstack : Blockstack helps you create completely de-centralized apps. This means apps that run on peer to peer networks with login identities completely controlled by the user.
Blockchain and Cryptocurrency has given us a different set of tools and principles to approach problems that have not been solved yet — A new paradigm.
As Thomas Kuhn writes, there are three parts to a discovery/invention
The previous awareness of anomaly, the gradual and simultaneous emergence of both observational and conceptual recognition, and the consequent change of paradigm categories and procedures often accompanied by resistance
We are probably in the third part of the Blockchain revolution, where we are adjusting our perception to the new principles, protocols and tools that Blockchain gives us, this is the part where it will encounter resistance from existing operating principles. This will help address a lot of pertinent issues that Blockchain has (such as scalability), and it will determine the future shape of what is a promising start to a revolution.
