Beyond the Crypto Bubble: Why Blockchain will transform our lives
Blockchain, Crypto, Bitcoin: These are the buzzwords in every conversation I have these days. There’s a lot of dumb money flowing into the Crypto ecosystem these days, and I’ve come to realize that 99.9% of the folks I talk to have no real idea what Blockchain is, why it is so important and transformative as a technology or the potential impact it stands to have on all of humanity. This ‘crypto’ bubble we’re brewing is a necessary evil in my opinion, that will only help blockchain as a technology attract more attention, rope in good talent and solid entrepreneurs to take the pain to slowly understand the underlying technology and weave it into our daily lives in a seamless manner. The crypto bubble will burst sooner or later, and a lot of capital will be lost by those playing the ‘greater fool theory’, but post this crash, we will see the emergence of the next big technological leaders, akin to how we saw Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook emerge from the ashes of the dot-com bubble crash.
But before we dive into the future and promise that blockchain holds, let’s take a quick step back into history for a moment to better understand how we got to this very moment, where one piece of technology holds enough promise to usher us into an exciting future. In the New York Times Best Seller book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Harari, he takes us through the journey of mankind, to show us why we, Humans (aka Homo Sapiens) are the apex of all species. And it all comes down to our ability to ‘group or band together, communicate and transact’ at a scale that no other species on this planet can.
If you go back in time, to about 500 years ago, our ability to group-communicate-transact was limited to villages & maybe towns, where were all knew each other and trusted each other. Then about a 100 years ago, came new forms of transportation, like cars, ships, flights, that enabled us to ‘group-communicate-transact’ across cities, towns, nations and even continents. Over the last 25–30 years, with the advent of the “internet”, we have expanded our ability to do the same, beyond all known boundaries to mankind. We have seen more global innovation happen in the last 30 years than we have combinedly in the 300 years preceding that, and we are able to transact with each at a pace that’s unforeseen in the history of humanity.
However, to enable us to do these transactions, we have invented middlemen, like banks, clearing houses, freight forwarders, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, etc — who create a layer of trust, amongst parties who have never met or seen each other, and facilitate transactions between them. As we expand and scale at this unforeseen rate, these same middlemen have started to add layers of inefficiency every step of the way. In addition to creating an inefficient system plagued by time-delays, theft, loss of data or loss of capital, these middlemen often charge obnoxious fees from both sides for merely acting as a trusted party, while providing nothing of significant value.
And as we usher into the age of machines, robots, and IOT, we cannot have these same middlemen sit in between acting as mediums of exchange or transactions. We’ll need something that is far more faster, seamless, frictionless, and automated, that allows any two parties, be it machines or humans who have never seen or met each other, to instantly group, communicate or transact without having to first form a layer of ‘trust’ between each other, but rather purely trust the underlying format that facilitates the transaction. And that is what blockchain allows us to do.
Decentralized system built on blockchain are going to change our day-to-day life in ways we cannot even imagine today. Starting from the way we transact with businesses or manage our assets, to the way we use machines, make purchases, vote, rent a car, and even prove who we are. Blockchain technology will transform financial institutions, hospitals, companies, and governments. Blockchain stands to disrupt potentially every single sector out there, by preventing theft, simplifying value transfer, streamlining processes, reducing errors, and by eliminating the need of a regulating middle-man or intermediary to be present. These intermediaries are typically age old institutions, serving no purpose other than to act as a notion of trust — blockchain is a disruptive alternative that threatens to replace all the archaic intermediary systems present today. The steam engine, electricity and internet were the biggest disruptive forces of the 19th and 20th centuries, and Blockchain technology has the potential to have as strong an impact on society as the aforementioned did over the past century.
Blockchain is ushering us into the next generation, as we expand beyond all known boundaries to mankind, as we expand across nations, continents and eventually across planets.
