Blockchain and the Information Superhighways
This story starts in summer 2015. Blythe Masters was on the cover of Bloomberg markets magazine, with a beautiful dress ornamented with grey diamonds pattern, reminding the Ethereum logo. « It’s all about the blockchain », and that’s precisely when that blockchain hype started. At first I really hated it. Digital Asset Holdings based all their marketing on the fact that the real revolution was NOT Bitcoin, but the technology underpinning it : the blockchain.
We (crypto people) perfectly knew what was going on. Bitcoin with its permissionless innovation had always been considered as a serious threat to capital markets, and sadly, 2014 bear market on Bitcoin was already over and this monster did not want to die, worst, it was growing more than ever. Developers, startups, infrastructure were starting to strengthen. Disruption was coming, something was needed to be done.
First we discovered « private blockchains », then consortium blockchains, DLT. All those technologies were everything but revolutionary. If you scratch their surface, you only discover a mere rebranding of our good old distributed databases. And for me and many others, the underlying motivation was crystal clear : we want to control your money, we are in charge here.
But we’ve already seen this before…
Information Superhighways
I know analogies often sound meaningless, but blockchains are very similar to the information superhighways of the nineties. By the time Compuserve, AOL, in the US and Minitel in France were competing to provide their own network, with proprietary technologies and dial-in fees, the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) won. Internet won because it was open and provided permissionless innovation, leading to what we all know today.
If I dig into obvious analogies, we need this TCP/IP equivalent to achieve the first steps of what is coming. We’re still in the infrastructure era of this revolution. Bitcoin is the best candidate to be part of it, in conjunction with other protocols, like the Lightning Network, Chainpoint or OpenTimeStamps.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t really think Bitcoin is a threat to capital markets, or for any other industry, it’s actually the exact opposite : in Bitcoin resides a fantastic opportunity. Yes, adopting it requires some radical changes at some point. But this will be a long process and embracing it soon is the best way to undergo massive disruption later.
We don’t need Blockchain. We need Bitcoin.
My 2 satoshis.
