What’s happening today with cryptocurrency is meaningful of the dot-com boom in the 90s. People investing in tech companies and wildly determined ideas of a more connected future were making millions of dollars almost overnight. Internet stocks climbed like crazy, and all of it was established on speculation. Much of the technology hadn’t yet been adopted at scale, but everyone was gambling big that one day it would be.
Some of those corporations are still around today. Many are not.
But pull back to an even wider perspective, and what’s happening with blockchain technology, you could say, is similar to the great American gold rush that happened in the mid 1800s. In 1848, when word first got out that gold had been exposed in California, entire industries began to bang in the hopes of capitalizing on the opportunity. The entrepreneurs of that era started stores that sold pans, picks, and shovels required to dig for gold. Larger companies invested heavily in railroads and transportation. And all of this was done prior to mass amounts of gold truly being found—it was all on speculation.
In a sense, that’s closely what’s happening in the blockchain space today.
You have to remember, the Internet didn’t “take off” until a universal language of sorts was recognized so that everyday users could build on top of it. Something we have done here at Narrated is actually bring together an Alliance of companies, the Trusted IoT Alliance, to work on creating a scheme of standards for global protocols, for the one specific use case of registering identities in IoT devices and sensors to blockchains—and having a system of standards, or a common language, for everybody to use when building on top of the blockchain.
In direction for wallets to be adopted on a large scale, a few things will need to happen:
- Less stress must be placed on the technology itself.
- Every consumer will need to be able to entrance their wallet on their mobile devices.
So, for wallets to become mainstream, they need to be as reachable as ApplePay.
These are just some of the shifts that will need to happen over the next little years in order for blockchain tech to begin acting as a sound infrastructure for tomorrow’s innovations. But I do believe these things will happen.
It’s just a matter of time.