Part I

It's the economy, clever - prehistory of blockchain economy

Let’s imagine how plants settle in a new patch of land – it must have started out first as one single sprout, then a naturally formed garden, then a jungle, a forest – in time a complete ecosystem had grown that would have the capacity to affect climate of continents. When we think about how blockchain economy came to pick up steam to snuggle up a warm place in the public psyche, it did start out the same way – first came a mysterious being called Bitcoin.

Then just as what happens in the natural world, the genes (characteristic algorithms) of Bitcoin spread and mixed with other genes of the same genus (of the blockchain gene pool) and other breed of blockchain species emerge and flourished. Then many participants of the blockchain movement predicted that one day this particular breed of economy will take over the world – just like mammals took over the earth from dinosaurs, just like that of an earlier techno-economic revolution of our time, the Internet. Well, not so fast. The uniqueness of Bitcoin and the likes of the first generation of Blockchain breeds made it difficult to scale like that of the Internet, thus hindering blockchain’s mainstream adoption.

Being capable to scale is fundamental and crucial in building up a thriving ecosystem, or economy. In the realm of the Internet, to scale is simply to scale out, meaning you just add more servers to cope with rising (or exploding) demand from new users. On the other hand, in the blockchain world, to scale is to scale up, meaning one must add new functionality to dig up values not visible before – it’s like to drive up the size of a business, you have to constantly build new businesses – this sounds hard and counterintuitive, not like what had been done in the world of business for millennia – well, it sounds hard because it is indeed hard and unprecedented.

If it’s not hard, or super hard, then it is not worthy being called a true revolution than the Internet, is it?

(cont.)