The innovation comes first but might not be the definitive one

Back in 1996 I created my first venture, one of the first online stores in Spain just right when I came back from my high school studies in the USA. In Spain we were still using the noisy modems at 56.6kb/s but rapidly the state of the art evolved to inimaginable speeds, capacities and innovations that the Internet facilitated. 

The Internet changed our lives and the way we are doing things today, and this is the kind of change that we are experimenting with blockchain, and obviously crypto today; in an smaller dimension, but still it's a huge shift for our society. 

Since the appearance of BTC, a disruption that generated the first electronic cash system, other great projects have been launched and impacted on us, adoption of crypto has been scaling constantly, and specially blockchain projects are everywhere with more real use cases everyday. Lately and derived of this, financial markets are starting to change in some form the way of doing things, trying and adopting these new applications (tokenization of assets, STO, DEFI, blockchain money transfers, etc.), and all these changes, despite that flourish derived from BTC, have been possible thanks to new companies/organizations/technologies that surpass the BTC itself, such as Algorand, Ethereum, Ripple, IOTA, etc.. and condemned BTC to the obsolescence.

These solutions are the ones that will draw how the future is going to look like on this space. We have to consider that this is not specific of the BTC and crypto/blockchain space, this happened always and everywhere; Tesla and Edison in the way how we manage energy, where they were the inventors but not the ones that deployed it at the end, or the same Internet which was based on ArpaNet, used by military, and once deployed for mass consumer use, other players like the Yahoo's, Netscapes, Microsofts, drawed the lines of how that Internet was going to grow and scaled and developed it.

But this is also important to tie it with the current discussion around the big energy consumption of BTC, as it is another element that can make it obsolete; some people try to justify it looking for arguments out of the discussion itself like this article https://www.coindesk.com/whats-the-carbon-footprint-of-fiat-money?amp=1 that compares the energy consumption of BTC with the money wasted in the crisis or the financial industry and governments that supports traditional money, and even when I may agree with the arguments regarding the big excesses made by governments and financial markets, it is not a fair argument to defend the high energy consumption of BTC. Even when we use renewable energy to mine, we are consuming a vast amount of that energy, that could be used for many other things, especially for using less fossil fuels to power other things, and therefore, if continue mining, we will require more renewable power to be built; and especially when there are better alternatives, an even better improved products, with more transactions, capacity, scalability, all with less consumption and with the possibility of becoming carbon positive with new add ons introduced by third parties. 

We are facing big threats for our society and our Planet, not only this horrendous pandemic, but also the Climate emergency that can make this pandemic look like a joke in the future, if we don’t act fast, hard and effectively. I think that the process of innovation for solutions inspired by BTC is escalating fast, in an unstoppable tendence to a something new, more efficient and powerful, and big energy consumption is out of the equation even when we could power that big consumption with renewable power, as otherways we will be building renewable power to support something inefficient and obsolete.

We have to be always thankful for the great innovation that is BTC, as it helped start this new era of innovation in the financial world. The state of the art is changing and we are just at the beginning of this new era of digital money. Let's adopt innovative thinking with clear values, especially if these values are better in everysense.