The Blockchain Bubble Will Pop, What Next?
My thinking about the blockchain&#x2F;cryptocurrency space shifted significantly when I changed my perspective from thinking about <i>technology</i> to thinking about <i>problems</i>.<p>The web caught on because in the late 80s, the biggest problem in the world was that we were starved for information.  We didn&#x27;t know it yet, because we&#x27;d never lived in any other world, but once we could fire up Netscape and view homepages from people who lived across the world, or talk in real-time on AIM with people half a world away, or ask any question of Google and get answers, or find whole communities of people who were interested in that incredibly niche interest that we&#x27;d despaired of ever meeting someone else to share it with, or view the satellite &amp; street view images of any address on earth, or order any product off Amazon and have it delivered tomorrow to our front door, it was apparent what we were missing out on.  And that has spawned multiple trillion-$ companies.<p>The biggest problem in the world today is lack of trust and the failure of institutions.  (Which, ironically, may have been been caused by the web and the huge amount of information it made available.)  And blockchains address this.  They don&#x27;t <i>solve</i> it - actually, my biggest resistance to Bitcoin &amp; blockchain hype earlier, and my biggest risk factor now, is that Bitcoin doesn&#x27;t actually solve the problem it&#x27;s purporting to solve.  People still get screwed when transacting in Bitcoin, they just get screwed by scammers &amp; hackers rather than the government &amp; big corporations.<p>But the problem still exists, and people are aware of it now.  Satoshi&#x27;s greatest contribution was to create something that could semi-plausibly fix it and then release it into the world, which generates all sorts of attention from other entrepreneurs.  Just like Tim Berners-Lee&#x27;s original WWW browser was pretty clunky by modern standards, Bitcoin is pretty clunky by modern standards.  But it&#x27;s attracted a lot of minds into refining &amp; replacing it, and as long as there&#x27;s a problem, there&#x27;s a market, and there&#x27;s a good chance that eventually <i>somebody</i> will figure it out.<p>(Or not.  Who knows, in the 60s everyone was sure there was a market for flying cars and robot vacuum cleaners.  We did eventually get both flying cars and robot vacuum cleaners, but so far the market for them is much smaller than anticipated.)