Over the easter holidays I had a bunch of beers and one of those was the DOWN STREAM HYBRID, I mean I had to pick it up, it had a QR code and everything and I just knew it was something to do with internet in some way, turns out they were talking about ‘blockchain’ and using the name as a spin on the product — super smart marketing if you ask me and also another way to get crypto out into the masses ‘though space’ so that it becomes a common thing.
This company is an Irish craft beer supplier and they spent quite a bit of real estate on the back talking about blockchain in general, which really brought me back to the places that we need to be in — the new wave of sustainable products and services, all roads should lead back to the steem blockchain right so let’s spend some time getting into those areas!
‘Blessed are the curious’ they say and I think they have nailed the sales pitch for all things new and mysterious right, blockchains and crypto are for the curious in society that want to try new things, that’s our power play right there, we should focus on the inability for most people NOT to be curious about something, our pitch is not about being bigger or better it’s about OPPORTUNITY and DIFFERENCE from what you have today that frustrates you, we need to do more story telling about the benefits!
What’s great about the copy on the back of the can is that it’s one of those moments where half way down the can and your taste buds are tickled you spin the can around and read the text on the back, it’s an opportunity to pull you in and to discover more — now sure, it’s a marketing and sales gimmick but the application process is there, I followed the QR code to the website where they had a numbered can and batch sequence, they have planted the seed that the information about their process is openly available — it’s super suggestive about the company, we are open, we are progressive.
People buy on progress from the stagnation of the old (even if they have no idea how it works) it keeps them RELEVANT in the fast moving world even if they accidentally picked up this can because DOWN STREAM meant nothing to them at the time, BLOCKCHAIN is back on the floating memory wordlist again and NORMALISING the new words is half of the battle.
It’s obvious to me now that the move for getting more people to use the steem blockchain is not about signups and retention so much but more about being in the ‘exchanges’ and exchange points between value and value, if the dapps of steam has taught me anything (steemhunt mainly) it’s that if you spend your time supporting an application on the chain then you can be rewarded for your patience and efforts
Take CIVIC for instance, it does not matter what features it has over another chain if I’m entrenched in following the BTC leader or my day to day STEEM blockchain, sure I’ll use ETH for paying for GAS to sell some TOKENS here and there but it’s just part of taking part, each chain works a little different and here’s the truth — the average person at point of sale won’t give a fuck about your market cap or feature list.
https://www.coindesk.com/civic-inks-deal-to-bring-blockchain-id-to-1000-vending-machines — just this morning as I was writing this post out I saw a post about the CIVIC coin and the vending machine payment demo getting picked up at SXSW, maybe the chain doesn’t matter but the speed and transfer of value/exchanges will be
And there you were wondering when CIVIC would do something and boom, they rock up at SXSW with their vending machine demo and suddenly someone wants to hook up 1000 machines with blockchain payment ability — the truth is, most of the time we might have a use case of how to improve all the numbers when overnight someone can come in and be like, this, this is the killer application to raise not only transaction numbers but usefulness for a chain — I’m sure CIVIC did plan for quite a low end task like vending but hey if it’s exposure that’s good start right?
Utility over whitepapers might just actually get this ecosystem into the everyday world to the point that eventually we won’t even realise that it’s already everywhere already, I think that time will happen really quickly, expect this to be in place in the next two years maximum.
Soon you’ll be able to walk up to a vending machine, be live streaming, auto exchange some tokens at the best case value from your different projects your engaged in and you’ll be able to get a drink from a machine, food from a hole in a wall and a train ticket back home in the early hours when the atm machine you used to use got pulled outta the wall.
Roll on I say, decentralise and distribute the wealth.
__humble
pinterest epic wins pinboard → brand advocate for nokia, 1000heads, verisign → won vloggie for node666 (san fran 2006) → television for time team history hunters 1999 → sold me.dm to evan williams in april 2011 → went to phil campbell, alabama to help raise money after tornado (was on sky news, bbc news)→ CNN for sxsw 2013 about austin sxsw → video chat with robert scoble → music video can you spot me?
