The blockchain genie is out of the bottle, so why are we still looking at the cork?
The blockchain tech isn’t a ticking time bomb. It’s already had its big bang moment — and now it’s working its way, backwards as it were, to quietly, but steadily, overhauling finance, voting, our very identity… life as we know it. But most of its growing pains now are the corollaries of how it came to be, and be so prominently, in the public eye — a well-publicized boom, a much prophesied burst, of one BITty crypto coin.
Why is blockchain adoption taking so long?
For most of us late-comers to the blockchain arena, its draw was the promise of making an easy buck on the crypto market, which, inevitably, also doubled as a promise that crypto wasn’t, in fact, all that cryptic. If you’d ever exchanged USD for EURO, you’d probably get the hang of trading fiat money for coins on the crypto market. But the ebb and flow of the cryptocurrency market should, ideally, only be a gateway to learning about the myriad use cases of the blockchain tech — smart contracts and tamper-proof voting among them.
The biggest challenge for crypto right now isn’t fluctuating coin prices, it’s the obscurity to which all its revolutionizing uses have been relegated as a result of the spotlight shone on coins as a largely passive means to store value (and strike gold).
The obstacles to mainstream adoption are not only an offshoot of the crypto trading daze we’re all in, but, more to the point, they stem from:
- a) the abstruse vernacular of most explanatory materials available on the subject, that is, blockchain tech;
- and b) the limited access innovators have to the general public, that comes with the territory of being in the vanguard of a new age.
In other words, the blockchain luminaries, the innovators, the app makers — they largely have an image problem. Anyone without a techie job/background/acquaintance will likely have only been exposed to the blockchain through sensationalist media reports about the rollercoaster that is the cryptocurrency market these days. As such, the general public largely equates the blockchain with Bitcoin and both with faddy get-rich-quick schemes. And that’s just scratching the surface of what this new tech can do.
How to educate yourself before the blockchain truly takes off
Even having techie friends won’t guarantee an easy first brush with the tech, or a passable grasp of why many in the know are hailing it as such a big deal. That’s because code comes in all shapes and sizes, aka platforms, and, while some coders might take an interest in the new tech on the block, not all of them will. Even if they do, out of curiosity, or because their company, like T-Me Studios, is a big believer in non-stop learning in general, and the blockchain in particular — they might have a hard time explaining the nuts and bolts of the tech without actually going into the 1’s and 0’s of it all, unless they’re evangelists of it. Or, indeed, unless they actually master the art of stripping away the tech speak and rephrasing concepts for the laywoman’s ear.
So, if you don’t want to be the Mom in the programmer meme who assumes fixing the modem and the thermostat is in a coders’ skillset by default — you’re better off going straight to the source than trying to coax the secrets of the blockchain out of your techie friend. (Who, by the way, will also likely visit the same rabbit-holes when she decides to figure it out.)
And, by source, I mean the wellspring of information that’s readily available online about the blockchain. I started a ‘Blockchain Trivia’ Pinterest board, which I’ll update regularly, with links that help me make sense of the tech, as well as its projected use cases.
But the main thing to remember is that, while the non-techie may be feeling a migraine coming on at the mere suggestion of asking Google for a crash course in blockchain, that kind of research will actually set you on an easier path than you’d think. There are a lot of resources out there (where I get my Blockchain Trivia links) that break down the new tech without falling back on heavy programming lingo.
Ultimately, it’s watershed moments like this one we’re in now that make you glad you’ve kept your mind on its toes and Never. Stopped. Learning.
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