Enough of the next shiny new thing…please
Seriously.
The “crypto” and “blockchain” ecosystem has become a clusterF%$&..
There’s a new supposed “blockchain” solution for everything these days, and it’s evident that 90% of these new blockchains are either stupidity, scams, vaporware or ok ideas that SHOULD NOT be built using blockchain architecture.
Now…one might say: “Thankyou captain obvious” — the market’s been frothy since mid 2017.
And I’d say: “Yes — I agree — but my point goes a little deeper”.
I’m talking about the fact that:
We’re all trying to run before we’ve learned to crawl.
We’ve got people building new prediction markets, file sharing protocols, spankchains, etc (which mind you are all excellent use cases for this technology) before we’ve even got the infrastructure layer right.
Although crypto & blockchain is “hot” right now, only a TINY slither of the population has actually participated in some way, shape or form.
If you ask your brother, sister, mother or cousin where to do the simplest act of “buying bitcoin”, they’d probably shrug & say “I dunno” — unless they’ve signed up to Coinbase from your referral link 😜
But seriously — everyone has “heard” of this stuff, on the news, through a friend, from their Uber driver — but nobody has actually participated.
Why?
Because it’s scary.
It’s complex. Nobody knows what it means, what it is, how it works, what they should do. Are they going to get arrested, hacked, lose their money, go to jail, get hit up by the tax man?
What do you think the average person thinks of this??
Which is all fine, because that’s the phase all nascent, revolutionary technologies must go through — the opportunity lies in the mess & uncertainty of it all — BUT…
If the simplest thing one can do is buy some bitcoin, and most people haven’t done that, then we need to stop for a moment & work this shit out.
Happens to the best of us.
Buying some bitcoin (or Ether) on an exchange and sending from Wallet A to Wallet B is step 1. Numero Uno. Ground Level. Entry Point A.
And instead of fixing this, we’re off to the races building decentralized networks & applications for some fuzzy future we may or may never get to.(which we’re probably wrong about anyway to be honest)
This is why the space is still the domain of the nerds, geeks & freaks.
Bitcoin was supposed to bring down the barriers. It was supposed to be an inclusive technology, but so far we’ve just built our own club.
And don’t get me wrong; building that club is critical. We do need a strong community internally before we can reach out to the rest & bring them along, but I’d say it’s time we actually start doing the reaching out part better.
So what do we really need to do…really?
Crypto, Blockchain, Bitcoin, whatever you want to call it — i_s still a fringe movement and a nascent technology._
We need to get the foundations right. And there are two parts to this:
- At a protocol Level:
- Security
- Privacy
- Censorship Resistance
2. At an application / user level
- Exchanges
- Wallets
- Basic Education
#1 is the backbone of everything, and it’s the core building blocks for us to have trust in this new technlogy. It’s what we DIDN’T do right with the internet.
#2 is what will increase adoption, and adoption beyond you & I is what this technology, movement & industry needs.
Where are we going wrong?
We’re doing the classic run before you can walk (or crawl) that all humans do when we find something new.
We think it’s going to solve world hunger & bring peace to all the land. As humans, when we discover something new, we always think it’s the panacea — until of course we realise it’s not — and then, instead of making it better or improving upon what we have, we go off building new shit that we don’t yet need!
It’s just human nature, it’s how our brains are wired. At our core, we think linearly and we function for survival (also linear), and we therefore get some important things wrong, for example, the difference between building the foundation and building the application layer.
Common misconception
Lets think about money for a second.
If we don’t get something as fundamentally important as the exchange of value right, where it’s censorship resistant, global, instant, secure, etc — then you can FORGET about all the other “cool” ideas. NOBODY is going to use your prediction market, nor your decentralized exchange, nor your global computer or anything else “decentralized” for that matter.
This is why I sometimes get shitty with these new projects or forks of bitcoin (for example). They’re worrying about things like throughput, before we have the building blocks of security, privacy & decentalization sorted out. In fact, they sacrifice those building blocks for the cosmetics due to the pressure of speculators 🤦🏽♂️🤦🏽♂️🤦🏽♂️🤦🏽♂️
Scaling issues will ALWAYS exist. They’re problems that every technology needs to solve as it grows. It’s not something you solve at the outset.
The scaling debate is a complete load of stupidity because it’s completely unnecessary. Again:
Bitcoin is still not even a store of value, let alone a medium of exchange. So it does NOT need to scale (yet). The transaction volume at the end of 2017, when the tx fees went through the roof were NOT due to the utility of the coin itself, but due to a short period of frothy speculation. It is NOT an indicator of the underlying protocol’s ability to handle throughput, nor is it a signal that it is unable to scale.
Before Bitcoin can become a medium of exchange, it needs to have passed the stage of being a store of value — and that takes time, trust & investment in infrastructure…noen of which we’ve had enough of!!
Anyway…that’s the topic of another post.
The problem we have in this industry is the short term thinkers & myopics with no experience, that want to slap bandaids on everything to get a quick fix (eg: block size increases).
That is NOT how you build foundational infrastructure.
You can’t build atop a poor foundation.
So what do we actually need?
Sorry, I was supposed to answer this in the previous section — but I digressed.
The genius’s at Bitcoin and Ethereum (and other great projects) are working on solutions that will speed up and scale these core protocols, whilst maintaining (or increasing) security, privacy, fungibility and decentralization.
I’m not going to speak for them, because I trust they know what they’re doing better than most of us.
But, I will speak for the area I know I can impact.
At the consumer / application / user layer, we need to focus on INCREASING adoption. And the points we can influence the most are:
1. Building better exchanges.
There’s multiple types of exchanges, but the most important at this stage are the Fiat → Crypto → Fiat (off and on-ramp) exchanges.
The crypto market is a piss in the bucket, $300bn ecosystem. It’s nowhere near large enough to be self sustaining. It needs more and better solutions around getting people involved, making it easy, simple, streamlined and ideally “fun”.
Now…When you consider that these on-off ramp exchanges also have jurisdictional restrictions, and you then think about how many national borders and therefore currencies there are, you realise that this is a big job — and one that needs brilliant minds behind it.
It’s one of the things our team & I are working on @ Stashh.io..
2. Building better wallets / storage solutions
Once people are “in” the ecosystem, the process of sending, exchanging, storing, securing, etc becomes the most important focus.
Wallets come in all shapes & sizes (literally and figuratively speaking).
Thought experiment: If you went into a bank to open an account & they said;
“Hey, we have 140 different types of account, some are safer than others, some are prone to getting hacked, others are safe but you need to place it in an underground vault, and you might need 1 key, 2 keys, 3 keys or more, and you’ll have to write your keys down & store them in more than one location just so you can get access to your money..blah blah blah”
I’m pretty sure you’d tell them to “get f$#%ed”.
Well guess what — we’re trying to get people to move over from the comfort and perceived “safety” of the traditional financial system with that sales pitch!
Seriously???
We need to work on better wallet & storage solutions.
Security and privacy are the first port of call. User interface & user experience come next but are just as important. It’s no good to have something perfectly secure that requires a Phd in information security just to operate.
Wallets need to have elegant, simple & secure key hygiene built into their user interface & user flow.
What some wallets feel like.
People need to be able to access their funds quickly, be able to intuitively send, swap or transfer, and then exit. It needs to be a breeze.
This is also an area where custodianship comes into play — wether at the user layer (ie; someone with large holdings stores their funds with a custodian), or at the host layer (ie; a hosted wallet provider, focusing on UI/UX will store funds on behalf of their users with a qualified custodian).
Again — this is something we’re working on, on multiple layers with Stashh.io
3. Educating more people. Better.
This is the final and arguably most important piece.
Now I’m not saying everyone needs to go to Uni & get a degree in cryptography, nor am I saying we need to force everyone to sit through a god damn Udemy course.
But — we can do more as a community to “educate the masses”.
There are 2 parts to this:
a) We need more institutes & training organizations that are designed to help people with the basics of getting involved in the space. This does NOT mean selling them into Ponzi schemes out the back of it, like USI Tech, etc.
These can be free meet ups, paid workshops, whatever. If someone is going to be putting $1000’s of dollars into this new asset class, a $500 course on figuring out what to do & the best way to do it is a prudent use of funds.
Meetups, which happen in alomst every city around the world are a great place to start.
b) Companies in the space need to educate their users. Coinbase is not bad at this, but honestly could do much better. Spaceship (in the superannuation space) is a great example. They keep their users educated on the market, with both weekly emails & alerts when something happens on the stock market.
We need MORE of this in crypto / blockchain land.
There is loads of content out there, and each company can do their part in educating their users at mutliple points, ie; marketing & outreach, on boarding, nurturing, new products / feature announcements, etc.
Content is another way. Company Blogs. Medium is a brilliant tool — it’s never been easier to educate your user base / followers/ fans / the market in general.
Other things we can do is curate great content that’s already out there.
My favourite weekly curated reports (by far) are Token Daily, and Token Economy by Yannick Roux and Stefano Bernardi.
They gather up everything & anything that’s of value (which is hard in this market) and condense it into TL;DR’s that you can dive deeper into should you wish to do so.
We need more of that.
No more of this crap. BitConnect, USI tech..horse shit.
In Conclusion
We MUST focus on the primitives first.
If we have the right building blocks, we can create anything.
If we rush ahead & just blindly build shit on top of other shit, we’ll wind up in a bubble that brings everything crashing down (which is arguably what 2017 was all about, and why we may be moving into a bear market this year).
We need to remember that Networks & infrastructure technologies are different to end-user or application layer technologies.
We need to support the infrastructure by increasing adoption, making it safe, easy & accessible for everyone to get access and thereby continue to build the networks which are changing the world.
Andreas, as usual, explains things perfectly in this video (first 4min).
So there you have it ladies & gents.
Lets get back to working on what matters most. The boring shit.
Disclaimer.
This post is not to take-away from some of the other great work being done, nor the propensity to push the envelope of innovation.
This is more a stab at the next shiny stupidity that pops up, or the next fork of an existing network, etc that we don’t need. There is enough noise.
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If you enjoyed this post, please show it some love, give it a clap (or a few) and pass it around to anyone you think should have a read.
Some of my stuff is a little rough around the edges, but it’s done that way to hopefully jolt people into think clearer / deeper into what they’re doing.
Hope you got some value & feedback is always welcome!
Aleks
CEO @ Amber
Would love your support + feedback on our project: www.amber.app
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