Cryptocurrencies and all the hype around them are the focus of much media and governmental attention as various discussions continue regarding regulating this emerging technology. However, while all the focus is on crypto, fewer are talking about the technology that underpins it all — blockchain.
The true power of blockchain resides in its underlying technology that promises to revolutionize the tech world and society as a whole. As crypto prices careen up and down, everyone loses sight of the fact that this relatively new technology is receiving heavy investment in its myriad future applications.
With very little understanding of such matters, the general public views blockchain as the same as crypto, which means it’s perceived as a largely volatile investment vehicle.
As you may know, the original cryptocurrency and the concept for blockchain was Bitcoin. Some people believe it is purely a coin and store of value in the way that gold is in the commodity markets. However, Bitcoin’s underlying technology is a valuable first version of blockchain technology, but minus functionality per se. Bitcoin is a store of value for people like any currency or commodity. So its value has been derived from the volume traded and the supply and demand of the market.
After Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies such as Monero, and ZCash appeared, providing anonymity for people moving money around and wishing to avoid nanny-state oversight. But these currencies have no function beyond this point.
Old cryptocurrencies (as in from seven years ago) are like a rudimentary single-blade knife, compared to today’s new crypto-technology, which could be more appropriately compared to a Swiss army multi-function knife. However, a growing movement of decentralized development has been happening largely out of sight of the mass media. Ethereum, for example, is the second-largest market cap coin. It has deep functionality, and some people call it “programmable money.” It’s been built using functionality called “smart contracts,” from which Dapps or decentralized applications run on the network while also being a store of value. When the ability to create smart contracts emerged, the crypto-technology landscape changed forever. Polkadot, Tezos and Cosmos took smart contracts to the next level, introducing decentralized democracy. This technology involves thousands of programmers rivalling some of the world’s largest corporate software development teams. The transformation possibilities it brings are so fundamental that people have trouble understanding what it can do and why.
Everyone knows that the Big Tech firms are selling our data, which, stating the obvious, is not good. To understand that this new technology could solve that problem naturally sounds like a good thing, but how? Well, today, many blockchain platforms are developed decentrally. The technology already exists in these platforms to make the internet private and return data ownership to the people. It is entirely possible that these platforms could replace systems or even corporations at scale. You can find out more about this by reading our article on decentralization.
So while, on the one hand, there’s plenty of negative discussion in the media about crypto and blockchain, even Big Tech is trying to enter the web3 space, though ironically, they are the antithesis of everything that decentralization stands for. Most large tech companies have blockchain groups, divisions, or development teams. They’re trying to harness the power of the blockchain for use within a centralized corporate for-profit agenda. However, such aspirations go against everything that this new technology is promising, and it promises a lot.
Cryptocurrencies are just digital coins, a necessary part of blockchain functionality. But the crypto frenzy of publicity has masked the real story about blockchain and how it can help us build a more equitable society. We are witnessing the era of blockchain’s global adoption, technologies that will, among other things, power the internet and preserve its ability to secure our privacy and data ownership.
Those truly decentralized blockchains are few and far between, but as with the early days of the Dotcom bubble, time and tests will weed out the weak or unscalable technology. What survives will become the driving force behind our next evolutionary technological wave.
