When I chat with most people about Bitcoin, Ethereum and the blockchain space, most cannot get past the first question of; ‘I don’t see people using bitcoin and just don’t see stores allowing bitcoin to ever be used, that’s why I think it’s a huge bubble and worthless’.
If I’m in a conversation and hear this, I flash back to myself in 2010 when I heard about the 10000 bitcoin pizzas. Yes a person actually used 10,000 bitcoin to buy 2 pizzas. This started a thought process for me and the deep dive into the bitcoin and blockchain space that over time really started to change my mind and paradigm.
Here is my list of 3 absolutely amazing things that blockchain willpower within the next 3 years that is going to change our lives (this list excludes tokens as payments)
- Internet protocols can now be monitized
Perhaps the most exciting thing about blockchain and fundamentally Satoshis breakthrough in cryptography is that transactions now can be performed for absolutely micro amounts.
So why is this so important?
In 1990 the internet was created and along with it a markup language html and the http protocol that is used to request and transmit web pages from web servers to browsers. Just think, none of these things were ever ‘companies’ or made any money. These life changing protocols were gifted free to humanity. Now, it’s been 27 years since the advent of the internet but most of the underlying protocols have not changed, which is why you will start to hear about internet 2.0. Essentially, the blockchain technology allows the worlds best programmers to finally work on underlying protocols by creating a token that is associated to the protocol, so they and other ‘investors’ in the tokens may be rewarded over time for their inventions and efforts.
Imagine if each day you looked at 50 websites and each time you paid .0001c and holding a token in that protocols blockchain project meant that you gained on that protocols usage and growth over time. Imagine further if eventually http was replaced by something much better and it became the ‘normal’.
This is a mind blowing idea
- Through the blockchains decentralized premise and the fact you can code ‘smart contracts’, think about all the things we pay for today that could be systemized into an automated contract. If you perform X, then you will get Y. Essentially the blockchain works similarly to how escro services work and will serve the internet 2.0. Furthermore, as it’s coded once, then on auto-pilot costs can become super low, speed will increase basically friction will be removed!
Companies working on projects in this space are endless, from how you get and pay for your power, using bandwidth and CPU power and being able to rent it, realestate, autonomous organizations, the wearables and other devices in the space of the internet of things - essentially the list is bound only by our imagination
- Blockchain is all based on cryptography and is such a new technology. All the time new ideas are forming on new ways to structure blockchains and scale. It’s likely the biggest blockchain projects may not have even been dreamt up yet, or started.
This is super exciting!
Hindsight is always 20/20, and in 2010 when I saw those pizzas being bought I realistically though this was some fad or a game. 7 years on I’m glad it peaked my interest and over the years I have learnt more and participated a lot. I hope that the above article is as clear and as simple as possible. Once consumers understand that payments may make up only 1% of the total blockchain ecosystem of offerings I feel it becomes a lot more compelling. Again I feel this is reflected in the current total crypto market cap now being up their with the top 10 biggest companies in the world (and this space has very few live and functioning blockchains and tokens)
Again 2018 , in my opinion,will be the year of market adoption. I personally think 2-3 trillion total market cap by the end of 2018 is totally realistic - but hey, so did the guy who bought those two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin 😀