The Top 4 Examples of False Hype in Blockchain
You might have noticed, but there has been some hype in the blockchain space. In 2016 it was the whitepapers promising disruption and evolution for all; in 2017 it was the white heat of speculation on cryptocurrencies and tokens. However, most of this brou-ha-ha has served for nothing other than to whip up excitement into a Q1–2018 disappointment when we realised we’re still a little way away from any serious goods and services exchange from taking place on blockchains. Here are the top five most debilitating sources of that hype:
1. Tokens. The only point of tokens is to raise money for start-ups. Very shortly after people actually start using services on whichever blockchain — Ethereum for almost all tokens — they’ll be dropped in favour of simply using the prevailing currency (e.g. Ether). You don’t buy WalMart tokens with your dollars to shop there, do you? Even if your start-up vainly sticks to its guns on the utility of the token you bought, someone else will just copy their business model and offer the same thing in exchange for Ether.
2. Ideas that don’t really need blockchain. Hucksters renaming their company ‘Company X Blockchain’ aside, there is a lack of truly compelling reasons for using a decentralised database in most start-up ideas. Marshall McLuhan spoke of new mediums aping existing ones until they find their own modus operandi, so I suppose we can forgive people this one. Furthermore, it is quite complex to engineer a social model of how people might exchange value given our current thinking is so utterly based on centralisation. But your Product X, but on Blockchain! idea probably doesn’t have legs.
3. Talking about Trading. A great deal of effort in blockchain is spent on how to profit from price movements (important: you’ve already missed the boat on this). Particularly onerous are those articles featuring headlines in the vein of ‘Johnny Bigbucks thinks Coin X will be worth a quadrillion dollars by 20xx’. Well, Johnny Bigbucks probably owns half of Coin X and has already seen the writing on the wall, people. Plus, he made his career doing something entirely different to crypto-speculation. While a fool and his money are easily parted, sadly here enterprising people and building durable blockchain goods and services can also dissolve their partnership by getting hung up on making a quick dollar.
4. Established company X partners with Start-up Y. So keen are we to see blockchain adoption in the wider world, that even the merest hint of a commercial partnership between a blockchain company and one more established generates a colossal fanfare. Everybody then piles into Start-up Y having done no due diligence, pumping the price (and their expectations). One week later, when a finished platform with millions of users and billions in recurring revenue shockingly hasn’t materialised, we’re back to square 0.9. And so on.
5. Vitalik the Super Genius. Everyone loves a hero, it’s true. But though he may write with the studied countenance of a fifty-year-old CS professor, Vitalik Buterin is still very young. More importantly, any durable system of anything must be bigger than an individual, must live outside of any single person’s vision. The amount of hype that follows him around can only be detrimental to his work. It will take a whole team to deliver Ethereum.
I must admit, though I’m critical of the sheer volume of fluff collecting in blockchain thinking, part of me concedes that it could be somewhat essential. Column inches means reach, which in turn means people will come to take part. Ultimately the adoption or not of blockchain is a numbers game. I just hope that the true buidlers don’t get distracted on the way through the fog.
