Unlocking the Power of New Technology: The Importance of Thinking 6 Steps Ahead
In the last couple of years, we have seen the rise of a lot of new technologies, technologies that are almost certainly going to change our lives. Still, innovation gets pushback all the time. Why is it so hard for people to open their minds to these new technologies and see what this could potentially mean for their future?
The crust lies in the word potentially. When I try to explain some of these new technologies to people, whether it is on LinkedIn via a post or in person, a lot of people get stuck as they asses this new technology to what they see NOW instead of looking at a couple of years ahead in time. The short answer is, we are still early and lots will still need to change in order for these technologies to reach their full potential.
I currently speak a lot about the potential of web3 (blockchain and therefore NFTs), the virtualization of our world, and the metaverse. Below are a couple of examples of common, negative, responses I receive. Now let’s compare these responses to older technologies that changed our lives forever as there are a lot of similarities to how people approached those as well.
“Cryptocurrency, blockchains, NFTs, web3, it is just all full of scammers and only created for criminals and such.”
There are two parts to this critique, let us start with the first one: scams. Yes, there are currently a lot of scams still happening in the crypto & NFT space but this is nothing new. First of all, technology doesn’t change human behavior and the same people that are trying to scam others in the NFT/Crypto space have probably done it before via other ways. So is this a reason to dismiss the technology? When people mature and get a better understanding of these technologies then it will be a lot harder to scam people, whenever something is new these scammers take advantage of the undereducated state of people. When it isn’t that easy any longer, they will flee to the next way of scamming people. It is just what they do.. Remember the emails you would receive from someone who wanted to buy your laptop and send it to Africa? Exactly, people actually fell for it until the world got educated enough to ignore it, so the scammers moved on.
Secondly, blockchain is for criminals. People might believe that it is only criminals, and criminal enterprises, that are using blockchain technology because it is an anonymous way to transact funds. Let me start by explaining that the blockchain is open, and not anonymous. The blockchain is so-called pseudonymous. Meaning you can see everything that happens on the blockchain (which address sends which addresses how many coins and/or assets), but there is no specific name, person, or entity attached to it. Yes, this is still a good way for criminal activity to take place but I again would like to ask you the question; is this a reason to stop a technology from developing? The number of good use cases of blockchain technology, where we either improve our world, our lives, or both, are far bigger than criminal activity.
For both parts of this critique, I would like to go back to the launch of the world-wide-web. There was a big group of people that saw that the internet would change our lives forever but we also saw downsides. The internet enabled people with harmful thoughts to come together, scams were out of control, real-life violence was available to children, and so forth. Can you imagine that governments and other influential people would have decided to stop the internet? That today we would have lived in a world without it? Everyone reading this would have probably made the same decision and that is to continue with the internet.
Every technology has a bad side to it, but you have to make a decision for yourself to either see the good or got stuck in just the bad. To reiterate, the positive sides of the internet, and now of blockchain technology, by far outweigh the negative sides so let’s keep fighting for positive change!
“I still can’t use my cryptocurrency anywhere so why does it matter”
One of the biggest use cases for crypto was/is digital money, a means of exchange for goods. The first purchase made using bitcoin was made by Laszlo Hanyecz, a programmer, on May 22, 2010. He paid 10,000 bitcoins (worth approximately 25 USD) for two Papa John’s pizzas. Today, 10,000 bitcoins is worth about 450 million Dollars, at the time of writing. Hanyecz made the purchase by sending his bitcoins to a fellow BitcoinTalk forum member who agreed to order the pizzas and have them delivered to Hanyecz’s home in Florida. Hanyecz’s purchase is notable because it was made at a time when bitcoin was a relatively new and unknown cryptocurrency. It demonstrated the potential for bitcoin to be used as a means of exchanging goods and services.
The adoption of new technology is a network effect, the more people start to use it the more useful it gets. Currently, cryptocurrency isn’t widely adopted by businesses or people so the real value still really sits within the ecosystem itself. The negative outlook on that is that this means technology is not as revolutionary as people think. But I urge you to change your thinking as this is, in my humble opinion, another example of looking at it in the wrong way. An example of why is when the first cars were being used instead of horses.
In the late 19th century, when commercial cars were first being deployed into the world, people struggled to see their potential. People loved their horses. Common phrases of why this new innovation wouldn’t work were: “this car breaks down easily on our roads”, “what if you run out of gas, there are no gas stations anywhere and my horse just needs a small break and some water to continue”, “It is too expensive to have a car, a horse is much cheaper”. Even crazier is the Locomotive Act of 1865, also known as the “Red Flag Act,” which was passed in the United Kingdom. This law required that all self-propelled vehicles, including cars, be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag or carrying a lantern to warn pedestrians and horse-drawn vehicles of the vehicle’s approach. The law also required that all self-propelled vehicles be operated by a team of at least three people, including a driver, a mechanic, and an observer to watch for other traffic.
Two things are pretty obvious with this example: 1) the world was not yet built for cars yet, the roads were not good enough so cars easily broke down and the number of gas stations was far too low. 2) Cars still changed the world, and our lives, forever.
Now let’s go back to the world of cryptocurrency and NFTs. It is correct that the real-life use cases are still limited for both, for NFTs maybe even more so than for cryptocurrencies. But if you compare what we could do with crypto 10 years ago, we have already come a long way in such a short time. As the NFT mania only started in 2020 it is to wonder what real-life use cases we will see in the next coming years. People complain currently that these avatar NFTs that are being bought and sold can’t be used in their favorite games. Obviously, this is indeed not possible yet, but I can tell you that we already see slight changes towards a future where that will be possible.
The point that I am trying to prove here is that all the people who thought the car was not going to be revolutionary because they couldn’t see it work in the world at that moment, were wrong. We see similar responses to crypto, NFTs, and virtualization at the moment and that is why I would like to invite you to open your mind toward a future where we do live our digital lives on blockchain technology. What could this potentially mean for you, your family, and your business or job?
“NFTs are just an investment vehicle and cryptocurrency is nothing more than digital money.”
The quick answer to both is: not true. I invite you to let go of these early use cases of both to open up your mind to the endless possibilities of these technologies. Let’s start with cryptocurrencies. We saw in the above paragraph that the very first use case for Bitcoin, which is the first cryptocurrency ever, was to use it as a medium of exchange. A digital version of money, decentralized, so not controlled by one single entity. Step one is to separate the coin from the blockchain.
Let’s use Ethereum as an example, currently the second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap. Ethereum is the blockchain, and Ether (or Eth) is the currency that you use on this network (the blockchain). The initial purpose of Ether (the currency) is that you need to pay a fee (in Ether) to use the Ethereum blockchain. In addition, people started using Ether as a medium of exchange to, for example, buy NFTs or other assets, which is already use case number two. But the really important element here is Ethereum the blockchain, the network, and the supercomputer, on which smart contracts can be deployed. Contracts that will execute based on certain inputs or outcomes, which once created can never be altered because the Ethereum network is not owned by anyone.
Now we know this, it can get very interesting. Currently, businesses are being built on the Ethereum blockchain, such as decentralized money exchanges like Uniswap. Uniswap is a decentralized exchange (DEX) that allows users to buy and sell a variety of cryptocurrency assets using smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. The biggest advantage? Because it is built on a blockchain, we don’t have to trust other people anymore with our digital assets. It doesn’t get safer than this.
The point here is that blockchains are useful for way more than just digital currencies or digital gold, Uniswap proves that but it is only the beginning.
NFTs are following a similar path. When the NFT mania started people saw enormous amounts being paid for “digital art”, something that never happened before. The top of this hype was the purchase of “Everydays: The First 5000 Days,” a digital artwork by the artist Beeple, which sold for a record-breaking $69.3 million at a Christie’s auction in March 2021. This is also the story that caused mainstream media to start reporting about NFTs and yes they stuck with all the money that was being spent, gained, and lost on this new phenom.
The result of this is that the majority of people, maybe including yourself who is currently reading this, think that NFTs are just things that you either invest in or you don’t. In order to look beyond this approach I would like to challenge you and ask you to let go of the fact that NFTs have to have monetary value in order to be of added value to our (digital) lives. I will give you three examples of NFT use cases that have nothing to do with monetary value:
- POAPs, a POAP stands for the “Proof of attendance Protocol”. These are NFTs that you can collect if you are physically, or virtually, present at a certain event, a moment in time, or as a reward for a certain activity. You can compare it to when people buy stickers of the countries they visited, to put them on their suitcases to show other people where they have been and to be reminded of the amazing experiences they had there. This is the digital version of that. The cool part now is, you can’t alter or fake them and you can only collect them at certain moments (or places) in time. For businesses, this also gives an interesting use case as you can use these POAPs to build a new group of loyal consumers and reward them with extras, such as parts of your website that can only be accessed if you have one of the POAPs.
- The reselling industry is a big one, let’s look at electric vehicles and sneakers. StockX is the biggest resell platform in the world for streetwear fashion and introduced an awesome use case for NFTs. As sneakers and certain fashion items get sold in limited quantities, they become collectors’ items and sometimes even rise in value. People buy, for example, exclusive Jordan 1 sneakers to never wear them en resell them to the highest bidder months later. StockX now launched a system where instead of actually getting the physical sneakers sent to your door, you buy the NFT that represents (and is linked to) this physical sneaker, and the physical version can remain in the StockX warehouse. Now this person can resell this NFT whenever he or she wants and if that person does want to wear them, they can have them sent to their house asap. The result? NFTs save a bunch of environmental impact by not having to ship these same sneakers all over the world, just because people want to buy and resell them. Not even talking about the extra possible value of authenticity verification.
- Another big resell market is the second-hand car market. Cars almost completely run on software these days, such as Tesla’s, which opens up a new world of possibilities when we combine this with NFTs. As mentioned before in this article, the biggest advantage of blockchain (and therefore NFTs) is that we don’t have to trust other people again. This principle can also be applied to buying a used Tesla. What if we link a dynamic NFT to the specific Tesla car, dynamic because the NFT updates its data based on inputs of that specific car? For example; how many miles the car has driven, how many errors it has had and which ones, how many updates the car has had, or the purchase history of the car. Because this information gets automatically updated into the NFT and therefore can not be altered with, we now don’t have to trust the seller anymore that this person is telling me the truth. Making it much safer for me to buy this secondhand Tesla as I know exactly what has, or hasn’t, happened with it.
Next time you see something new, be curious instead of judgemental.
I sincerely hope that the above examples open up your mind to the wide variety of possibilities that blockchains and NFTs can bring us into the future, we are still scratching the surface. The same happened when the mobile phone was released and they were only used for calling and text messaging. Can you imagine we stopped innovating the mobile phone because “just calling and texting was good enough”?
Look at these technologies as that very first mobile phone and now look at your iPhone and think about all the possibilities it currently has, the same will happen with NFTs and blockchains. We are still super early and the goal is to not look at what you see right now, and judge it for that, but look beyond and open your mind to what could be possible.
When a new industry is on the rise it is good to keep an eye out for three different factors, which you can use to determine if it is real or hype: capital, attention and especially talent. In the last two years, we have seen more attention than ever, more capital being invested by the large venture capital firms but also by the tech giants and other brands, but most importantly talent, flow into the blockchain industry. There are just too many highly talented people working on all these challenges that denying the potential of these technologies doesn’t seem like the wise thing to do.
I truly hope that this article gave you a wider perspective of why blockchain will change our lives, for the better, and why you should be paying attention as well. It will affect your business, your career, and your personal life. By understanding and learning at least a little bit, you are already getting ahead of it and can benefit in more ways than someone who will be late to the party.
Thank you.
Funs
