I am an avid fan of blockchain, as most people in the steemit community. But what is it about it that I like so much. I can summarize it in one sentence:
Decentralization of power
So how does the industrial revolution relate to blockchain? Don't worry folks I am perfectly sober. So to touch on that relation, let me explain what a characterizes an industrial revolution.
An industrial revolution has to check the following conditions:
- Change the way we communicate
- Change the way we transport things and move
- Change our margin efficiency(when we take a resource from the earth... how much value do we get out of it. For example solar energy... currently we can absorb much less than 20% of the energy that we receive from the sun. So our margin efficiency for solar energy is 20%. We can apply that to everything from food and water to oil)
So lets start with the first industrial revolution:
The first industrial revolution was brought to you by fish and chips lovers from Great Britain in the 18th century. They brought in:
- The printing press(able to print mass amounts of communication for a much cheaper price)
- Trains and railroads(able to move much faster and transport lots of goods)
- The average margin efficiency went up to 10%(meaning after taking something from the earth, we gathered 10% of it's value and lost 90%)
Obviously technological advances were the kickstarter for the revolution but they were also accompanied by policies' changes. Unions started being formed to protect workers, women started working in factories and demanded better working hours and safe conditions and so on... The combination of the printing press, the use of coal and the engine were the basis of the first industrial revolution.Tasks previously done laboriously by hand in hundreds of weavers' cottages were brought together in a single cotton mill, and the factory was born.
Now let's move on to the second industrial revolution:
- The invention of phone allowed people to communicate at the speed of light
- The discovery of oil and the car engine allowed mass production of cars
- The average margin efficiency rose all the way up to 15% and in some places 20%(Germany 2015)
The ability to communicate instantly with someone half way around the world is truly one of the greatest human feats ever. Think about it... one day you would have to write a letter or wait months until you saw a loved one and the next you can hear their voice just as if you were standing right next to them. Also, now everyone could start going wherever they wanted to go with a car. Think of it as everyone got their own personal train. This cut the cost and traveling time for most people by more than 50%. Henry Ford mastered the moving assembly line and ushered in the age of mass production of anything that people were willing to buy.
The Third Industrial Revolution
So how do we fit into all of this. How does our technology fit into the grand scheme of things. Lets look at the things that I believe will pave the way for the next industrial revolution:
- A network of knowledge accessible to anyone(we are pretty much there except for the accessibility part)
- Automated and shared modes of transportation(think drones and driverless cars... we are not too far away)
- So here is the one that is missing. Average efficiency margin. We are still not getting the most out of our resources... Remember the main resources of the first two revolutions, coal and oil respectively. Our main resources need to be ones that will be available to everyone and are instantly renewable with little to no cost: renewable energies. That means after we build the solar panel, the wind turbine or the electric driverless car... there is no big cost to getting the benefits. This could put our efficiency to above 40%. But for this to happen, we need your average person to be able to sell and buy energy from decentralized energy grids(we got big players in the crypto world already trying to do this).
So how does the blockchain fit into this? Let's think about the first condition that I mentioned; a network of knowledge accessible to anyone. If you watched the USA elections closely, then you know there were multiple data analytics firms that were harvesting facebook data and using it to target citizens and pockets of citizens to win their vote but.... this information was at a high price and not available to everyone. There was also an attempt to repeal net neutrality... which would have given the benefit to big companies and would have allowed them to increase visibility if they paid more money. Basically, think for example Netflix could pay money so that users get good video quality from their websites while Steemians get a lower quality of video stream.
These two factors do the following :
- Denied access to the data based on purchasing power
- Unequal access to data and visibility
Are you connecting the dots? Blockchain is not owned by one person. Sure there are whales but once we start implementing more uses of the blockchain(like Steemit!) we will shift the power from the hands of few people to everyone. Everyone has a chance to access the data and the data is trustable and available to everyone. No lords and kings... just networks of people. That's the power of blockchain. A trustable, decentralized network of value where no one can rig the system. So many applications are already using systems to implement efficiencies: VeChain(trustable source of products), Siacoin and Storj(trustable decentralized could computing), 0x and Binance and Airswap(decentralized exchanges) and Steemit!
This is why blockchain must win. Blockchain will unleash the Third Industrial Revolution and you are already a part of it.