No short cuts…
… put simply: hard work, out of the box thinking and chance sometimes
Crypto market capitalization has gone from 20 billion dollars to more than 50 in little more than 8 weeks. To me, however, even being a finance expert, the bubble in financial terms isn’t worrying. I am concerned about the growing Blockchain ‘business’ growing in the shade of this hype. Business in which unethical individuals and organizations are generating revenue streams for concepts like ‘Blockchain for non-technical savvy’ or funding their ‘initiatives’ through ICOs, etc … They sell the concept and analogy of ‘Everyone uses email or the Internet without needing to know how it works’.
For three years I have been studying the crypto phenomenon and educating or evangelizing in different forums and I always emphasize the same thing:
The quantum leap, the great achievement, of the internet and to a lesser extent of email, is the free spreading of information, freedom of the press, blogs, social networks, etc … They all consist of the immediate ‘free’ propagation of zeros’ and ones’ strings. (meaning on/off states). It works transmitting or rather replicating information, not value. Even worse, the internet has destroyed value: all kinds of content protected by copyright laws and intellectual property regulation have been massively pirated.
With the invention of bitcoin (distributed ledger associated with a token), transferring information (value) only once in the digital environment (0/1) becomes fact. This is achieved by combining techniques or technologies, such as mesh networks, hashing, modern cryptography or double entry accounting. Piracy or fraud, in cryptocurrency, is not possible thru double spend or callbacks. A very refined incentive scheme makes cheating unattractive to the actors. who could see how these practices dilute the value of their assets or how the price of goods and services goes up to compensate for the ‘calculated’ losses of the fraud (eg credit card).
To summarize: It is not the same to ignore how the internet works (in the physical world, the printing press or a newspaper) to read a blog, send an email or read a book. When we refer to value, however, it is important to know how financial products work, eg a mortgage loan or preferential shares and so is it very convenient to know how bitcoin works, any crypto, a smart contract, or an ICO.
Going back to the subject, the scarcity of good professionals in our immature ecosystem causes some people and businesses to try to run before walking, which is like building a skyscraper without a foundation. We saw a perfect example with the Slock.it DAO which resulted in the ETH / ETC hardfork.
I think I have crossed the equator of my life and from experience, I can tell that sustainable progress, advancing and reaching higher levels of awareness, is not achieved through shortcuts, but thru hard work, good ideas or being in the right place at the right time.
How Satoshi, who has or has preferred to remain anonymous, connected the dots or connected consciousness-knowledge-energy to leave us this legacy, is a mystery but used well profound changes in the economy and with it in our society will be triggered. He, she or they didn’t take any shortcuts, nor sought personal and quick gain (those tokens are still in their original addresses).
It’s us, Satoshi’s heirs, who have been given these tools, to make this world a better place for our children to live, share, decentralize, … I am increasingly excited about the projects of friends and acquaintances of our crypto-community emerging from sleepless nights, dedication, determination and vision, which try to improve the distribution of energy, government understood as a service, humanitarian aid, land registry in developing countries, decentralized insurance, intellectual property protection and many other.
I agree that mass adoption will arrive with applications focused on value added and user friendliness, the nowadays holy grail of blockchain developers.
Organizing exhibitions, congresses, or masterclasses of something you do not know well, deceives potential clients and is a business model which doesn’t last long. Smoke and mirrors.
NO SHORT CUTS, just hard work, out of the box thinking and Bon Chance.