Crypto is the Github of money
Crypto is the Github of money.
Step by step, various Blockchain projects, Dapps, and related services, will provide benefits to everyone, as what Github did for software developers in the past ten years.
If you think that this is an obvious thesis, I might agree; but have you observed the crypto world with the lens of a history lesson from Github?
Let’s talk about three things:
1) The importance of “time to market” / “time to action”
2) The Github + open source effect on software
3) Crypto and its effects not just on developers, but on everybody.
Hear me out.
ONE: Time to Action
I was at Amazon Web Services (AWS) from 2008 to 2014.
2008 was really early days for AWS. I was technically the first employee in Europe, when there was only Amazon S3 (EC2 came later that year). I was joined a few weeks later by my future boss, Martin Buhr, and we remained just two for several months. Great times. Tons of work to be done. I think I never really slept for years.
Why AWS won, and became a $20B+/year business?
AWS was not the fastest. It was not the cheapest, by any means! It was somewhat elastic, but not really the way it was supposed to be.
But AWS won hands down on an ESSENTIAL metric, “time to market”:
AWS allowed you, with some limitation, to quickly launch virtual machines and storage in minutes (not days or weeks, as the norm was), and then turn it off immediately when you no longer needed them. Just swipe a credit card.
(note: “time to market” is the time it takes from a product being conceived until its being available for sale. “Time to action” means how quickly you can use or consume a service (like AWS), in order to speed up the time to market of your product. It’s as if “time to action” is a factor in “time to market”).
Have you ever tried one of these electric scooters that are all the rage in Santa Monica and San Francisco these days? They’re terrible, they’re unsafe, they smell, they’re not that fast… But somehow they’re like a drug. You see one, and twenty seconds later you are riding. You feel a teenager again. Try to do that with a shared bike, or with an Uber.
Great time to action, of course (it only takes twenty seconds to start consuming the service). But also a very fast time to market, as the company managed to launch and expand in a matter of a few weeks.
There are things that fundamentally change our view of the world. The iPod and the iPhone, for example.
AWS was one of these things, if you were a developer. Electric scooters are one of these things, if you are a biped with a smartphone.
TWO: Open Source, Github, and the right incentives
Let’s focus on developers again, and on something that deeply affected their time to market.
I can’t claim to have been a great software developer but, from 2008 to 2014, I personally met with 1,000+ developers a year, and I would hear their stories on AWS, on PHP, Python… and Github.
AWS won the hearts of the developer community, and kudos to the team; but it was also at the right time! We can call it the reinassance of software development, driven by the right platform (Github) and the most value-creating approach (open source). This reinassance maximized the value created by software.
As Marc Andreessen famously said, “Software is eating the world.”
Github was the fork, and open source was the knife.
(Github was the fork… You got the pun, right?).
Open Source had existed for decades, but even if Linux was already an adoption success in certain categories (e.g. web servers), back in 2008 it was still unclear what commercial success you could have had with anything open source, barring a few exceptions.
In my AWS years (2008–2014), open source became the center of attention: Android was unveiled in 2007 (did you know that the original goal was to be an OS for cameras? Thankfully it didn’t last for long), Cassandra in 2008, ElasticSearch in 2010, Hadoop in 2011, Docker in 2013, Kubernetes a year later… And so on.
It is my firm belief that Github is the biggest contributor to the success of these open source projects. Why?
Because it allowed developers to gravitate around an initial project or idea, work on it, and get public recognition for their contribution.
All of a sudden, your contribution could follow you to your new job, and then follow you again. They became part of your resume. They would represent you, forever. What an incentive to do more and more!
Of course, it made it dramatically easier for people to collaborate on a project, and for “strangers” to create a pull request, or to fork your projects, and speed up project development by at least one order of magnitude. (this is where time to market has been vastly improved).
Publicly available contributions also increased accountability for projects that had a higher purpose or mission, not focused on money but on the impact they could have in the lives of other developers, or the world in general.
So, to summarize: the right platform (Github) was the catalyst for the open source movement, allowing it to quickly expand its reach and influence in the technology world.
The effect on many projects has been a faster time to market, which somehow acts as an essential “drug” you can’t do without.
Once you use Github and collaborate, you can’t go back to the previous modus operandi.
Companies didn’t (and don’t) make money on open source products directly, though: they use open source as a way to boost adoption and increase credibility. It’s a catalyst (again) for their business.
THREE: Crypto as the catalyst
We should now ask ourselves: what’s the “drug”, and what affects time to market, in the crypto world?
The “crypto” space now comprises thousands of projects (most of them hosted on Github, by the way), thousands of companies, and it has received several billion dollars worth of investments.
Collectively, these companies and projects represent a “distributed” version of a Github-like service, where you are showing your composable pieces of a new architecture of money, each able to interact with all others through the Blockchain protocols.
APIs provide the means of interaction; Blockchain and crypto payments provide the means of “paying each other” for these services.
A permissionless Blockchain, moreover, also acts as an immutable public ledger, on which you can write things that nobody can destroy or censor. What a great way to build trust!
In other words, the following elements are all being redefined by the “crypto” ecosystem, very much like Github and open source completely redefined these in relation to software development:
- Consumption model
- Collaboration model
- Reward system
The effect is a much faster time to market for projects that affect how you exchange value, money, and trust. This applies to everyone, not just software developers.
And, very importantly, crypto is not JUST money (as others, smarter than me, have recently affirmed).
An example: if you want to buy my house, can you trust a written contract that is also permanently written on a Blockchain? Once you do, it fundamentally changes your perception of the previous methodology.
Once you can “transfer ownership” in one minute by simply moving a tokenized asset from seller to buyer, you don’t want to go through the several days, high fees, complex paperwork you’ve been using until now.
Do you want to refinance your mortgage? Today it takes two months, ten hours of emails and phone calls, and at least $1,500 of fees (waste). It shouldn’t be this way. It should be as easy as it is to launch a virtual machine on AWS, or to ride a Bird electric scooter, or to fork a project on Github.
New technology stacks will be built around one/some Blockchain(s) (Bitcoin? Ethereum? Something else? Who knows). Entire ecosystems of services will also be built around these. Entire industries will be transformed by the Github of money.
It will look like a “token economy”, perhaps, or even bigger/broader than that. Still early to know the details.
Whatever you do, your industry is going to be affected by this, pretty much like EVERY industry has been affected by software in the past two decades.
Github was (is) about code.
It changed the developer’s life forever.
Crypto was (is) about money, value, and trust.
It will change everyone’s life forever.
But be patient. It will take time.
And, since I’m tired of the usual shameless plug at the end of an (hopefully) informative article, I will just stop here and let you figure it out by yourself :)
Enjoy your day, and let me know what you think!
