Worse than the bubble, blockchain’s dangerous echo chamber
I’m not new to the blockchain space. I’ve held cryptocurrencies since 2013, been an occasional miner since 2014 when you could earn XRP by contributing to Berkeley’s grid computing project, and an entrepreneur working with blockchain technology since 2015.
During these last 5 years, I’ve watch the space grow and evolve from a rather obscure corner of technology and anarcho-economics to the center of an emerging movement towards decentralization and the remaking of trust. Bitcoin rose from around $200 to a peak of more than $20,000, Ethereum was conceived and launched, and hundreds if not thousands of teams with ICOs have jumped into the fray. However, for all of this, there’s one thing that I’ve found to be unfortunately consistent. And that’s the tendency of those of us in this space to isolate ourselves.
In a lot of ways this makes sense. It’s honestly exhausting to constantly explain the basics of blockchain technology and its merits to “outsiders”; it’s comforting to be a room where everyone agrees that cryptocurrencies are going to the moon, and all we need to decide which moon they’re likely to land on, ours or Saturn’s; and since many of us have grown emotionally attached to the change we believe blockchain can affect in the world, it’s scary and upsetting to have that view challenged. For all of these reasons, and likely more, you can now find longtime adherents to this doctrine at highly-focused conferences, workshops, and meetup groups nearly anywhere in the world.
Now none of this is to say that the blockchain community isn’t welcoming to newcomers, after all, what religion doesn’t want to grow its numbers. But acceptance does nothing to alleviate the crucial problem that has been in the blockchain space for at least as long as I have.
Our willingness to welcome those who have already convinced themselves in private of blockchain’s merit, does nothing to make our space into what it needs to be: firmly rooted in the problems of the world, moderately skeptical of itself, and in close dialogue with other emerging (and even some forgotten) technologies and economic schools of thought.
I believe that it is important for the blockchain community to become more integrated with the outside world exactly because I am personally so invested in the promise of the space and believe that willful and active openness and engagement is the only way for us to thrive. And as I’m confident most sociologists would agree, cultural and intellectual groups that isolate themselves nearly always become increasingly radicalized and dogmatic and eventually find themselves unable to effect the change or progress that precipitated their very existence.
Lucky for us, there exists another path. Two weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to pitch Topl at South by Southwest (SXSW), an annual confluence of music, art, culture, and technology drawing more than 200,000 attendees to Austin, Texas. I was invited to participate in a pitch competition organized by Capital Factory, one of the leading tech incubators and in seed investors in the US. Of the 4 judges for the competition, only one, Tiana Laurence, co-founder of Factom, was a “professional blockchainer”. The other three judges, Manoj Saxena, Stephen Wolfram, and Richard Garriott, were instead highly qualified technologists and investors from outside of the space.
The varied expertise and backgrounds of the judges, combined with the eclectic atmosphere that is SXSW, created a very different event than those where I usually present. The questions were sometimes more rudimentary but consistently more challenging. The search for real value in our proposals was harsh and unrelenting. The perspectives we heard from were often unfamiliar.
All of this, left my co-founder Kim and I feeling both more and less excited about ourselves and the blockchain space than usual as we headed back to Houston. We weren’t met with the comforting echo chamber and the familiar conversations about how visionary some so-called thought leaders are, but we headed back to Houston emboldened by the fact that we had been able to answer tough questions and even convince some blockchain skeptics that at the very least blockchain is right for Topl, if not for everyone.
I believe that people in the blockchain space should embrace the skepticism of “outsiders”. Because if we’re not solving real problems or creating sustainable value, our projects shouldn’t exist. If we can’t answer the tough questions, we need to reevaluate and re-organize. And to paraphrase Albert Einstein, if we can’t explain the blockchain to those who know nothing about it, perhaps we don’t understand our own technology as well as we should.
Thankfully, SXSW isn’t the only place where this attitude of openness and healthy skepticism is already being embraced! It’s being embraced in the Netherlands where the Brightlands ecosystem is attracting blockchain companies and talent to be part of a broader conversation about technology and innovation. Additionally, there are many companies and founders that I’ve met who proudly define themselves by the problem they solve and only view blockchain as the current best solution.
We must re-frame the conversation and the way in which we as blockchain entrepreneurs define ourselves if we want to avoid the fate of many innovations and cultures that turned inward and isolated instead of outward and rooted in reality. Even as I write this, on a flight away from a conference in which I felt most everyone would have ferociously resisted the idea I’m describing now, I’m optimistic that we can make this change.
So if you want to learn more about the work Topl is doing in international finance and development (while simply using blockchain technology to meet our ends) or to discuss this or any of our other blog posts, please follow us here and join us on Telegram: t.me/Topl_ico.
