Something has been bubbling away at me in the back of my mind for a while now, a question. A question I could not put into words until just this very moment…
Are those in our community who call out the loudest for crypto to obtain mass adoption, in fact, the very people who’re preventing mass adoption from taking place?
Currently there are a bunch of what I’ll call “cliques” which have emerged in the blockchain space and each seem to have their own (very strongly held) ideals about just how this new tech should be built, and how it should be used.
It’s good to be early, it’s great to be an innovator, but there is a dangerous tendency for groupthink to form in new communities. I think we’re well and truly in that part of the growth process currently.
Lets take a look at these “cliques” as I call them and see what they’re about:
BTC Maximalists – These cats think BTC will be able to solve every single use case that comes along and if only we’d all just wait, and accept all of the many issues and compromises, BTC will be the magic bullet to solve all our monetary and transactional woes.
They think off chain solutions (often called layer 2) are the way to scale. In my opinion, if most of our transactions happen “off chain”, we’ve not moved far past the private servers we have currently and there’s little point proceeding with this tech at all…
ETH Fundamentalists – The Ethereum fundamentalists seem to believe that because ETH was first, it has some intrinsic right to be the only smart contract platform globally, forever. They ignore the fact that nothing lasts forever, and that often in new industries, the pioneers are not necessarily the ones who become dominant over time. Did Ford make the first car?
I’m not suggesting Ethereum can’t scale, or that it won’t survive. I am pointing out that we will absolutely have multiple players at this level and as we’re still in very early days, no one can say who the dominant players will be for the next wave of adoption.
Privacy Nuts – Don’t get me wrong, privacy is indeed a good thing, but not for everything in all cases. Companies need to comply with local and international law. Like it or not, this is reality. Their books must be auditable and in many cases, their clients must be known to them (KYC) and their transactions need to be auditable (AML).
Privacy has its place but there are as many (or more) use cases for known identities on the blocj chain than anonymous ones.
ICO Junkies – Low market cap, big announcements coming, the most promises out of any crypto and did we mention the partnerships?!?!?!
These people are the adrenalin junkies of the crypto space. While some of these people may indeed end up with their “Moon Lambo’s”, most (in my opinion) will go broke while trying to go all in on the next biggest thing…
These guys are constantly swinging from FOMO to FUD and back again… What a ride huh?
Barriers to Mass Market Adoption
What I feel many participants in the crypto market right now fail to understand, is that mass adoption will be a convergence of block chain and the existing infrastructure. Not a total flip from one state to the next.
A few Examples:
- BTC will not be the solution for everyone
- ETH will not be THE only block chain platform
- Sometimes transparency is more critical than privacy
- Not every ICO will “moon” (and in fact it is my opinion 95% of existing ICO based cryptos will be gone in a year or so)
There are many projects out there trying to tick all of the supposed necessary block chain features. For example; there are companies trying to bridge the gap between current banking and crypto assets, while claiming to allow totally anonymous transactions peer to peer…
No banking system in the world can or will allow this to occur. There are heavily entrenched regulations around Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML). These are global standards almost all governments have agreed to. (all governments with a functional government have anyway).
Millions of hard earned dollars are being captured by projects whose use case does not align with reality in any meaningful way. Others have no real need for a block chain aside form the marketing aspect it provide the new start up. Much like the early dot com days really…
So…, What Could Mass Market Adoption Look Like?
Standards and practices
Monetary Transactions – Standards for moving sovereign nations currency must align with existing KYC / AML legislation, globally. There is no getting around this currently. To move fiat currency around (currently), you have to have a company I the middle and as soon as you have this, you have a weak point, an attack vector, a single point of failure… One day this will not be the case but there will be a “transition period”, whose length no one knows between our current banking and finance system and the next.
A set of standards and best practices will need to be developed, and largely agreed upon, prior to any significant global mass adoption can occur here.
Personal Data Transactions – While this is not as heavily burdened with regulation as the monetary focused use cases, it is becoming increasingly regulated and there are some aspects a block chain cannot comply with currently (like the mandatory deletion of customer data on request from the customer).
There are solutions being arrived at here and I think the eos.io storage (using the Interplanetary File System or IPFS) is around about where it will be headed. The ability for a block chain to prove a file is correct and unaltered, but with the ability to delete it at the file owners request is mandatory as far as I’m concerned.
B2C Transactions – Existing businesses adopting block chain as part of their back-end solution. Of course, there will be new entrants into the market as there always is, but I see mass adoption only when existing businesses begin utilising block chain/s to improve their service offering while reducing operational costs.
I also see this space being a mix of both public and private block chain solutions. Some large multinational businesses may run several nodes of a block chain, distributed across it’s head offices in each region as a way to ensure consistency of data and reduce risk of down time etc. This is much like their existing, centralised server model however it will bring some improvements into their businesses.
It may not be necessary for many of these to be run on a public block chain. If their data is not overly sensitive, and their customers are not demanding higher security etc, it may just be enough to use a private block chain solution internally.
P2P Transactions – Don’t we have this already?
This is one of the big-ticket items many blockchain advocates state as the primary use case for cryptocurrencies.
I disagree.
While it is true that in many 2nd and 3rd world nations they are in need of fast and free peer to peer payment systems, we effectively already have them in most developed countries, and the existing crypto platforms can already support most global micro payments peer to peer…
I do feel we have a large, untapped P2P space opening up in blockchain but it has a lot more to do with smart contracts than with simple payment processing.
This, (to me), is where things get really interesting. Remember when you first used ebay? You suddenly realised you could buy (or sell) to and from anyone, anywhere in the world. The only downside was fees from ebay and paypal, and the ever-present scammers selling junk or flat out ripping you off.
Well get ready for the next evolution of P2P market places. This is where only reputable entities can maintain accounts in decentralised market places. Here’s a few attributes I see coming down the pipeline in the new generation of P2P offerings:
• Little or no fees for buying or selling
• Programmable smart contracts, so conditions of sale & payment can be enforced via the block chain
o Shipping tracking number entered and validated prior to payment released to seller
o Part payment held until tracking marked as delivered
o Payment on software sales not processed until product is registered
o Etc. etc.
• Market places tiered by buyer and seller ratings (optional) to increase security
Government – I believe governments will use a mix of both private and public block chains depending on use case.
Private Blockchains Performing Current Government Functions – Banking. I believe central banks will issue crypto currencies in place of existing currencies. The central bank will be a super node, as will all current banking institutions. All transactions will occur on chain and as such they will be free and instant.
There will be no block rewards, incentive to run a full node will be to take part in the system.
We crypto early adopters may not like this outcome, many are expecting crypto to free us of government issued money however that’s not what I’m seeing. Central banks around the world have been working on this (in one form or another) for about three years now (publicly anyway, maybe more before they were willing to speak about it).
I do feel there will need to be an international settlement layer built on top of this. Think in terms of a World Bank / BIS having another private block chain where all central banks around the world are running a super node. This way all settlements between countries could be made on chain in the “world currency” which would, in reality only be used by governments and central banks.
Change happens gradually and while I do believe we’ll see a transition to non-debt based banking, I feel we will most likely move through an interim phase first where our current system will be moved “on chain” with as few fundamental changes as possible.
Here’s an info graphic I made to illustrate one way I think this could look:
Public Blockchains Performing Current Government Functions – Data. I see the need for public chains to manage things like property ownership, registration, Identification, voting, education and reputation (tied to ID).
As our interactions become increasingly global, it is not efficient for us to be corralled into geographic based, private groups (private block chains) for things like ownership and governance.
It is my opinion it will not be feasible for government operated, private block chains to manage this layer as it would very quickly become a bottle neck. Given government’s penchant for “outsourcing” anything and everything they can to avoid having to maintain it themselves, I feel they are likely to let a lot of these functions live on public chains in order to achieve efficiency and provide the transparency their population will soon demand of them.
This is a simplistic view, however it gives a basic idea as to where I think this layer of Blockchain is headed:
In Summary
Blockchain will indeed be present in many aspects of our daily lives, however many of this will be completely invisible to the end user. It is impossible to tell just when and where it will take hold, but we can make some educated guesses.
There’s a saying in Continuous Improvement that centres around looking for “low hanging fruit”. There’s no point trying to go straight to the most difficult and expensive solutions (both from a monetary and a time perspective), before you’ve addressed the simpler solutions.
In the case of blockchain, I feel we’ve been trying to tackle the biggest, most difficult problems first. Specifically, the monetary system.
While I agree, our current debt based fractional reserve banking system is the number 1 problem facing humanity today, and that blockchain will ultimately solve this problem. I see other, less regulated areas like supply chain management, social media, data management and P2P trading being implemented long before the monetary side is solved.
At the end of the day no one truly knows what’s coming next. I believe the move from Proof of Work (mining) to Delegated Proof of Stake (block production) will open the door for permission blockchains to begin implementing the first true global DApps.
It is also my opinion eos.io is the best pace chain to achieve the adoption required to start the blockchain revolution for the masses. Otherwise known as Mass Adoption. With their main net launching this week, there’s no way of knowing for sure what will happen, but I for one am eagerly awaiting the eos.io launch to find out.
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