My response to Kai Stinchcombe

12/25/2017

The anniversary article reflecting on Ten Years of Bitcoin triggered a storm of heated debates. And no wonder–it was a great write-up launched at the best possible time—the calm silence before Christmas, when no one is working and everyone has plenty of time to lazily wander around the house and wonder, with a craving for juicy news.

Kai makes a number of excellent arguments, but he seems to be knocking at the window while missing the wide open door.

Let’s start with the basics...The “Ten Years” Argument

It’s common knowledge that Bitcoin was first released at the end of 2009 (version 0.1). A number of bugs were discovered and resolved between 2009 and 2013. Looking at the issues that were addressed back then (transaction malleability, unexpected network fork, etc.), it is hard to associate the word “stable” with it at any time before early to mid 2014, even with the caveats and disclaimers one often uses to handwave road bumps with any new technology. For all practical purposes, the age of Bitcoin as an applicable, functional technology rather than an abstract concept is less than three to four years old.

By all practical measures, three to four years means a technology is still in its infancy. ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, was established as early as in 1983, but it took seven to ten years before we saw the explosive growth of the 90s. That being said, someone in 1994 could have written a perfectly logical article titled “Ten years later, no one’s come up with a use for the Internet,” for example.

It took another ten years for fundamental changes in travel, stock trading and a number of other industries to take place. In fact, the overwhelming shift to online shopping over brick and mortar didn’t happen until 2010 or later.

Social media and the online advertising industry that it facilitated didn’t hit their stride until the mid-2000s. After that it took another 10 years for online advertisement to finally wrest control from TV and print, only really occurring in the last year or two. All in all, it took 20 years or so for Internet to deliver on its promises. Why would be Bitcoin or any other manifestation of blockchain be any different?

Disruption of existing industries: payments, stocks, banking, distributed storage…

If history offers any lessons, the disruption of an existing industry does not happen simply as a result of the invention of new technology. New business models, fueled by the technology or creative applications in the context of existing models, are instead often the cause of a disruption to the paradigm. It’s not that unusual for existing players to embrace and prosper with new inventions rather than allowing themselves to become obsolete.

We still buy cars from dealers—but the majority of car shopping happens online. Did dealers go out of business? Not quite. The smarter ones embraced “the online” to drive even more sales than before.

Stock trading — today many investors trade using online brokerage accounts. Charles Schwab saw lots of early success as a pioneer in online trading. Did any broker go out of business as stock trading shifted to the internet? I’m sure some did. Did others survive and become even stronger—that’s not even a question.

Bitcoin and blockchain are no different than other technology innovations we’ve seen before. In fact, history is repeating itself right in front of our eyes.

Nasdaq and a few others united behind R3—the consortium looking to enable trading on the blockchain. The hope is to simplify the stock settlement across market participants—a manual, involved process that takes up to three days to complete after the purchase. Yes, you read that right—it takes around three days for your one-click purchase to finally settle and register in all affected books. Could the blockchain provide a superior alternative? It’s easy to see that it should be explored, at least.

Visa and MasterCard operate a global network of connected and mutually trusted nodes. Lots of work goes into certification, audit, and secure operation of individual nodes. Could blockchain ease some of the requirements as a result of its trustless model? Absolutely! Is it possible that payment costs will be lower as a result? No doubt. Does it mean the world of plastic cards must switch to the blockchain for each and every payment? Absolutely not!

There is no need to consider extremes—no need to aim for the extinction of a business or a vertical for blockchain to succeed. There are plenty of opportunities to compliment, enhance, and extend.

Where are the opportunities?

Joe—the cool guy—launched a file storage service and offers it cheaper than S3. Would you trust him with your sensitive files? Not likely. What if the payment for Joe’s service was cryptographically contingent on your retrieval of files and matching of hash codes? We just replaced the trust to the unknown party Joe with trust in the integrity of a decentralized network, supported by hundreds of billions in individual investments that is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Clearly, there is an opportunity for Joe and his customers.

Joe launches a Kickstarter campaign on a new, cool IOT device. The campaign goes well, devices are shipped, Joe maintains a server with device registration. Suddenly Joe goes out of business, taking the servers with him and rendering the devices useless. Would it be better if the registration data was stored in a blockchain, eliminating the risk of owning a device that outlived the manufacturer?

More on this point—the number of accounts and registration records is exploding with the growth of the consumer and industrial IOT. Account maintenance is becoming a serious expenditure, affecting margins and profitability. At the same time, it is almost never a core business function for an IOT maker, who would happily hand it over elsewhere. Clever developers at Xage (https://xage.com/) have already deployed an account management solution for industrial IOT (Disclaimer: I am not involved with Xage in any form or fashion).

Despite the hysteria surrounding the Experian story, anyone with meaningful experience in corporate IT would say that Experian is not any worse than the average. In fact, not better or worse, just average. The issue is not that they should have been better. It is rather the enormous concentration of data creating unbearable risks.

In absence of better alternatives, Experian must be the collector of records and the custodian, compute FICO and perform a number of other functions that leads to enormous risk concentration. An alternative that stores records on the chain and only infrequently opens access to Experian and other parties based on explicit customer authorization could be much more secure and reliable, leading to a clear win-win. Notice that credit ratings did not go away, credit agencies did not get replaced with the blockchain, but rather agencies became a participant in a new engagement model.

I could go on for hours, but hopefully the overall premise is clear by now:

Bitcoin and blockchain should not be evaluated in the context of head-to-head competition looking to drive incumbents into obsolescence.
Similar to the Internet and other innovations, Bitcoin and blockchain will take time to mature.

Technologies do not change the world, business models do.

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