Of all the corporations buying into Bitcoin, you'd think that Big Tech companies would be the first to ape in and make sure to frontrun everyone else. Ironically, they will probably be the last to buy in. Why is that?
- Microsoft
- Amazon
- Telsa
- Netflix
- Oracle
- Apple
- Sony
- Panasonic
- Cisco
- ...
Corporate greed?
We really have to look at the situation from their point of view. We are now a tech company, and our job is to make money. How have we made all of our money up until now? By controlling a service, locking it down with intellectual property laws/patents, and making sure the competition doesn't stand a chance.
Right out of the gate we see why Big Tech will take forever to capitulate and buy crypto: because they want to control it. Already they have pumped BILLIONS of dollars into "enterprise blockchain", which is really just a fancy way of saying "pointlessly inefficient database". No matter how many billions they pump into these things, closed sourced permissioned blockchains will never gain popularity. It's only a matter of time before they figure that out. Surprising they haven't already if I'm being honest.
Undead Projects don't have a soul.
Vitalik said it best. Crypto is alive and networks need to have a soul to survive and scale up. Without community backing enterprise blockchain will never succeed, and they will never get community backing because the competition coming out of open-source tech will immediately sap all their users away.
Even if they were to build something amazing, it wouldn't matter. Whatever they built would be reverse engineered and deployed on a real borderless permissionless network. Those IP laws and patents aren't going to stop a permissionless network from incorporating that code. Top-down regulations can no longer stop this tidal wave from crashing.
So why are Podunk corporations buying into Bitcoin? Because they don't have the resources to even try to attempt and control this Goliath. Might as well just get in on the ground floor and capitulate immediately. It's the same story with small impoverished countries. Those who have the most to gain and the least in their pocket are going to jump in first. When the status quo isn't serving the vast majority of the population, something has to change.
Meanwhile Big Tech is perfectly happy with the status quo. They don't need nor even want anything to change. Why would they capitulate and buy tech that they don't control? Let's try again guys, we can do it! We can build something we control and turn our users into little Matrix data farms once again. Yeah, it's not going to work out like that this time around. Web 3.0 is superior to Web 2.0. No more free service in exchange for monetizing massive swaths of data.
Conclusion
Big Tech is in for a rude awakening, and the longer they wait around to jump into crypto, the more money they are going to have to fork over to jump in. Which is obviously fine... they have plenty of money. It's better if they wait for it and then get gouged 10 years down the road. They can afford it, and the entire point of crypto is redistributing wealth/power.
But I don't think they will wait ten years. My guess is during the next mega-bubble cycle 2025. Things are moving exponentially, and while it's pretty obvious they aren't going to get in on the current train, the next one will be waiting. Just a guess, but I think these are the timelines we need to be considering. Predicting the future 10 years out has become impossible. Exponential growth is explosive and rather unpredictable.