By some act of grace, by some fortune, or genius, a revolutionary new technology has been unleashed upon the world, but it has largely gone unnoticed.
Image Credit: agsandrew / shutterstock.com
“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
― William Gibson
I don't mean to suggest that the ± $750 billion combined market capitalization of cryptocurrency is a trivial indicator of attention or interest, but rather that the kind of attention which is being paid to the implications of the underlying technology ― the blockchain itself, and its potential impact on society, has largely gone unnoticed.
That is to say, for all the billions of dollars now chasing after crypto-riches, for all the millions of people who read “Bitcoin this, or Bitcoin that...” in the headlines, and for all the tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of people for whom the term blockchain resonates with even a faint glimmering of awareness or understanding, there are precious few who seem to fully grasp the staggering implications which blockchain technology presents to humanity.
However, while the multitudes remain unaware of the very existence of blockchain technology, a visionary few have seized upon the blockchain's potential to restructure the very nature of society.
But What Is a Blockchain?
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the underlying technology behind cryptocurrency, and what makes it so unique, you have to look under the hood a little bit.
For the rest of us who may already be familiar with blockchain technology, perhaps a periodic review of the properties which make a blockchain so unique would be helpful for the sake of maintaining perspective.
“...blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way.”
“Blockchains are secure by design and are an example of a distributed computing system with high Byzantine fault tolerance. Decentralized consensus has therefore been achieved with a blockchain. This makes blockchains potentially suitable for the recording of events, medical records, and other records management activities, such as identity management, transaction processing, documenting provenance, food traceability or voting.”
“A blockchain facilitates secure online transactions. A blockchain is a decentralized and distributed digital ledger that is used to record transactions across many computers so that the record cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks and the collusion of the network. This allows the participants to verify and audit transactions inexpensively. They are authenticated by mass collaboration powered by collective self-interests. The result is a robust workflow where participants' uncertainty regarding data security is marginal. The use of a blockchain removes the characteristic of infinite reproducibility from a digital asset. It confirms that each unit of value was transferred only once, solving the long-standing problem of double spending. Blockchains have been described as a value-exchange protocol. This blockchain-based exchange of value can be completed more quickly, more safely and more cheaply than with traditional systems. A blockchain can assign title rights because it provides a record that compels offer and acceptance.”
For complete citations, please see the full Wikipedia entry on "Blockchain" as I have removed the citations for readability.
Blockchain technology is only 9 years old.
Bitcoin came into existence just 9 short years ago and is the prototypical blockchain, but Bitcoin was just the beginning.
Just think about that for a while.
For a mere 9 years humans have had a rudimentary working model of blockchain technology. Before this period, it just didn't exist, except as a concept that a very small handful of people had ever considered.
And during that time, besides the most intrepid developers and explorers, the rest of humanity has been almost completely unaware, distracted, and mislead as to the actual potential of this technology.
Since the advent of Bitcoin, there have been many other blockchains besides Bitcoin, these are known as “alt-coins” in the blockchain (cryptocurrency) space. Most of these “alt-coins” are simply clones of Bitcoin, but a handful of them have proceeded along independent lines of development arriving at ever more elegant solutions to the inherent challenges of blockchain technology: scalability, the method of consensus, mechanisms for governence, the degree of decentralization, and so forth.
Some of the innovators, to name the ones that I'm most familiar with, and to further flesh out a timeline of sorts, are: Bitshares, Ethereum, and Steem.
- The Bitshares blockchain 1.0 - launched 4.5 years ago
- Ethereum launched 2.5 years ago
- Bitshares 2.0 (pitch-fork to Graphene) launched 2.25 years ago
- Steem Launched 1.75 years ago
So, just contemplate, what we're now seeing with Steem is essentially a 4th generation blockchain, and the current iteration of the technology is not quite 2 years old.
Just based on the recency of blockchain technology, and the particular innovations within the space, imagine how many developers in the world are qualified to work on a project like Steem without extensive training, and you will realize it is an astoundingly low percentile.
Steem: The Blockchain Elephant in the Room.
A quick comparison:
- With the Bitcoin blockchain...
you can send and receive Bitcoin, and that's about it. To do so will take you upwards of an hour, and the fees are currently around $20 USD equivalent per transaction. Sure, your transaction will be irreversible, immutable, and there will be no third party between you and the other party to the transaction. - With the Steem blockchain...
you can send and recieive STEEM and SBD (STEEM Dollars), you can post content to the blockchain, you can vote for content that you read / view on the blockchain, you can vote for who runs the network, you can send memos, and you can get paid in STEEM and SBD both for posting content, and for voting for your favorite content. You can perform any of the above transactions in 3 seconds (really it's about 1.5 seconds on average) and there are zero transaction fees. And much more functionality is just waiting to be unlocked.
This animation by 
And how about this one from 
“A Finger Pointing at the Moon”
“It is like when someone points his finger at the moon to show it to someone else. Guided by the finger, that person should see the moon. If he looks at the finger instead and mistakes it for the moon, he loses not only the moon but the finger also. Why? It is because he mistakes the pointing finger for the bright moon.”
― The Shurangama
As you are most likely reading this on Steemit.com, the flagship “front-end” of the Steem blockchain, you are directly witnessing one of the more interesting applications of blockchain technology yet to be seen, on the fastest, most scalable blockchain currently in existence (with the possible exception of Bitshares, Steem's older sibling).
You are reading words which are forever stored on the blockchain, resistant to censorship, and on a platform that pays rewards directly to those who create value for the blockchain through the content they create, and the work they do on behalf of the Steem community. All of this would have been entirely unimaginable just a few years ago, and yet here we are.
I didn't set out to write a primer on blockchains.
I just need to get things in perspective so that we might better consider the timing, the historical significance, the urgency, the unbelievable potential for this technology to radically transform society, for the better.
We owe it to them, to ourselves, and future generations not to miss the mark on this one, not to confuse the markers with the game... Price, transactions per second, confirmation times, the small fortune in your wallet... None of this will matter if we don't travel the distance and make these inventions matter, for humanity, for good.
If we have access to a vehicle of such unprecedented, revolutionary, world-changing potential... we have a responsibility orders of magnitude greater than many before us, to remain focused, to explore and discover new implementations of this technology, to bring the benefits of this technology to the greatest number of people as quickly as possible.
