Happy Birthday Blockchain!

The original paper “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” was published ten years ago on 31st October 2008.  This was seen as the original trigger for the development of blockchain based platforms (although it didn’t expressly contain the phrase “blockchain” – if you don’t believe me, take a look (https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf ). A few months later saw the deployment of the bitcoin blockchain and on 22nd May 2010 the first recorded purchase using bitcoin was recorded when a programmer purchased two Papa John pizzas for 10,000 BTC.

Ten years later there is criticism about why the technology hasn’t yet gone mainstream. Is that really fair though ? How long does technology take to go mainstream ?

Care to guess when the first motorized vehicle was designed ? I sometimes ask this when running workshops or as part of conference presentations. Typically answers are usually around 1870’s….which isn’t a bad guess. But is wrong! With the power of Google and Wikipedia at your fingerprints you can quickly learn that the design of the first motorized wheeled vehicle is attributed to Ferdinand Verbiest with his 65-cm-long scale-model toy for the Chinese Emperor. It was a theoretical design (so akin to the bitcoin paper) and was created in 1672. It wasn’t until 1769 that the first full-scale self-propelled mechanical vehicle was built by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot. That’s nearly one hundred years between ideation and inception. And, as my audiences tend to reflect, it wasn’t until the 1880’s that we began to see cars being developed. So, incept to scaled-up production took over 200 years. And blockchain has only had ten years so far?

Ok, so comparing industrial revolution technology with 21st century is a bit unfair, particularly when we know that tech evolves at orders of magnitude faster now than it did a few hundred years ago. So let’s look at a technology behemoth … Apple. This is a company with a Trillion Dollar market cap and Bitcoin is a mere $109Bn. Just think, Apple Inc. is worth almost ten times the total market cap of Bitcoin. But hang on….Apple is over 40 years old. It took Apple 32 years to hit a market cap of $80Bn. It took Bitcoin just eight years to hit that number. 

The only “fair” comparison of bitcoin and blockchain is that of “The Internet” which was fundamentally built on the TCP/IP protocol which was developed in the 1970’s (40 years ago) and gained widespread adoption with the introduction of HTTP (the protocol that led to the World Wide Web) in the 1980’s. So we’ve taken 30 years to get to a scaled platform where we can share pictures and cats. How does that compare to CryptoKitties ?

So, are blockchains incredibly energy intensive ? Well, some of them are but that’s because they were designed with certain goals in mind, and energy efficiency wasn’t one of them. Engineers are working on alternate consensus mechanisms which are far more efficient. Aren’t cryptocurrencies used just for money laundering and criminal activity ?  No, they’re not. In fact a report on the topic said that Bitcoin was ranked at number 30 for such nefarious purposes. The US Dollar remains firmly in first place. 

To those who say that Bitcoin and Blockchains have no purpose, use or benefit, then that’s fine. Sit back and watch the rest of us create the future. We’re only just beginning the journey.