When it emerged a couple of weeks ago that Ebay had quietly filed patents last year for a cryptocurrency payment, reputation and monitoring system (read more about it here http://ift.tt/1MmH3Tb), I had two conflicting reactions.

The first one was that feeling you get when you’ve been around in Bitcoin for some time: a kind of ‘At last! They finally get it!’ type of reaction.

The second feeling was a growing realisation that in fact, they don’t get it at all.

Point 1: by the time a leviathan organisation like Ebay gets around to investigating, developing and testing a radical solution like this, other people will have already done it much better and faster. The Augur Project, for example, have an interesting take on reputation — and are already live.

The engineering teams at Ebay have a great reputation for delivering innovative, quick-to-market solutions, but anything that needs to be investigated, costed and signed off by layers of non-engineering management is not going to rival the level of agility and speed of turnaround that a small startup can offer.

Point 2: they are quite simply missing the wood in the decentralised forest. A centralised corporate entity like Ebay appending cryptocurrency to their existing solution is akin to the way newspapers originally viewed the internet in the Nineties.

Print publishing executives simply did not see disruption coming. They could envisage new technology delivering lower printing costs as content could now be sent directly to distant printing complexes that were closer to the distribution centres.

And they acknowledged the existence of their fledgling websites as a useful adjunct, which could help publicise the content of their newsprint editions.

But in the Nineties, few of them recognised the true disruption that would soon arrive.

The commercial threat to Ebay doesn’t come from one of their competitors adopting a cryptocurrency payment solution: instead, it is more likely arrive in the form of a fully decentralised, autonomous, peer-to-peer marketplace.

Read this sentence on the http://openbazaar.org/ site and think carefully about what it means: “Because there’s no company or organization running OpenBazaar, there’s no one to charge you fees to list your products and no one to register an account with..”

The execs at Ebay might dismiss this now as the dream of a small minority of enthusiasts (exactly the way the World Wide Web was perceived in the Nineties), but they would be wise to draw their lessons from the past.