If you’re reading this, you’ve heard of bitcoin, you may well use it, and you’re likely of the mindset that recognises cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology will change the world. The benefits and the innovation are just too great to believe otherwise.
You’ve likely also recognised the speed bump in the road to blockchain adoption. Namely, people don’t use crypto. Ok, the likes of us do — the guys who are happy setting up and securing wallets, dealing with private keys, downloading clients and messing around with exchanges that may or may not be slightly shady. You don’t know until it’s too late. And whilst these wrinkles are being ironed out with regulation and best practice, the fact remains that crypto adoption didn’t go the way we thought it would two or three years ago. People didn’t adopt bitcoin because it was a vastly superior way of paying for goods and services. Most people are happy with fiat, thank you very much.
We may not agree with them, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that fiat is, really, very popular. And it doesn’t show too many signs of going out of business. So as far as crypto adoption goes, we need to take a left turn at the traffic lights.
The Trojan Horse:
Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously coined the phrase ‘The Medium is the Message’ — going so far as to say that ‘the “content” of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind’. Grasp the fact that Twitter fundamentally shapes how you think and communicate by shoehorning your ideas and opinions to the medium of 140 characters, and you’ll get the idea.
Which is why what we’re doing with Incent is really rather disruptive. We’re not selling crypto. Or rather, we are literally selling crypto, but we’re not ‘selling’ crypto as an idea. We’re selling loyalty-as-a-service, brand strength, customer retention, meaningful rewards. Crypto is just there under the bonnet as the way we’re doing it. It’s the medium to our message.
We don’t want customers to have to grapple with blockchains, or merchants. They probably know enough about them to recognise that there are huge benefits, but like 99% of the population they’re not going to care about how they work, let alone getting to grips with their complexities. And who can blame them? Frankly, I don’t care a great deal about TCP/IP; I just like the fact that I can access the BBC and a million other websites from my laptop. I leave the geek stuff to someone else.
Incent is the Trojan horse of crypto. It’s how blockchain technology will be adopted by mainstream businesses: as a solution to a real-world problem, but one that sits under the surface like TCP/IP and that most consumers never have to deal with directly. Every business that adopts Incent (like the Temperance Society bar, or Sure Green, our two earliest adopters) to power their rewards scheme will on-board hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of customers — all of whom will use a blockchain-based currency, and none of whom will have to worry about downloading clients or securing private keys.
Once critical difference is that you can’t invest directly in TCP/IP, the infrastructure of the internet, but you can invest directly in the Incent blockchain.
Naturally, the 1% who realise what’s going on will be poised to do very well out of it.
Guy Brandon