When you start to do something, you don't know how to do it well.
It's like when you make pancakes: for the first one you don't know if the pan is hot enough, if you nailed the batter, or if there's enough oil on the pan. It's only after you tried it out and assessed the consistency, the hotness, the taste that you can adjust the parameters. The next pancakes will get better and better.
In the startup world, this process is called "iteration". You start with a minimum viable product, which most of the time sucks, and you take it from there. But even if the MVP sucks, it's usually consistent enough to give you an idea about what the startup is trying to do. Just like the first pancake, as bad as it is, should be closer to a real pancake than to a pickle.
The same thing happens in any major technology cycle. If you look at the automobile, the mobile phone, or, to get closer to our time, the crypto markets, everything evolves from an initially ugly and somehow limited product.
Bitcoin is the first pancake. Sorry, bitcoin maximalists, I know. You still pretend the first pancake is actually a pancake. Well, it's not. It gives a rough idea about what crypto is, but it's not the final product. PoW is slow, transaction times are ridiculous and you can't execute contracts on chain. So, that's it. It was a good first try, but now it's time to move forward.
When I make pancakes, I usually make about 10. A can of milk, a can of flour, a spoon of sugar and 4 eggs (in case you really want to know the composition).
So, if Bitcoin would be my first pancake, I think Hive would be around the 3rd one. Cosmos (and the entire ecosystem) would probably be the 4th pancake.
My point is that we're already in a stage where we can enjoy real, tasty pancakes, and we still have quite a few iterations in front of us. We're not early anymore, we're right in the middle of the action.
Tasty times ahead.
Photo by Edson Saldaña on Unsplash