I have been long enough around the crypto space and I have seen many things have recently change. From the hype of “stamping” out coins (forks), where you would spend up to 8 hours a day in the “ANN” threads of bitcointalk to the latest ICO craze in 2017-18.
During those years, many of things have happened: “the good, the bad and (most definitely) the ugly”. Unfortunately the latter has happened more occasionally than one could have wished for. I guess this is the way things work. I am actually really glad that I am able, to not only see all of this unfold, but am able to take part in this by myself. Being able to see a real decentralized revolution happen right in front of me. Something definitely, we will one day, tell as a story to our grandchildren.
In this article, I would like to talk to you about what people have seem to have forgotten. The true essence of what the blockchain is. Its essence. Its core. Its values. But the again, they are certainly different for each one of us out there. So I’m guessing that the values I will be talking about are first of all my own subjective beliefs. And I truly hope, that someone can find a point of interest (and a point of use) in those for himself (and for his project).
Before we jump in and talk about the intended, I would like to thank for a big chunk of the inspiration in my work (and by saying “in my work”, I mean this, globally) to Andreas Antonopoulos and his belief in the fact that the world can be a slightly better place.
In order to grasp the idea of the difference between a “blockchain” and an “open blockchain”, let us, first of all, have a look, at where the ICO market stands as of today. The ICO market has had a lot to do with the popularity of the blockchain technologies today. One may argue a lot against it, but one also has to admit that it is thanks to those people who came into this world via the ICO market, it is they, who may have lead us to glory and fame…. Or is it?
Starting as of 2016, the vast majority of those companies who came into this market, have not heard the word “blockchain” prior to that. They never researched the market. Never cared about what was its intentions and so on and so forth. Most of my colleagues and myself have been present at a large number of (blockchain related) conferences over the past 4 - 5 years. A lot of the time I have said - that this market will repeat the “.com” situation. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The “purge” that happened back in 2001, led the way for the IT industry giants of today.
The problems (just as then) begin when marketing starts to overtake the product, as soon as that happens, it usually means that a crash is near. It means, that there is nothing to give, but a lot to sell.
The majority of my time I spend around the CIS (and its neighbours) ICO market, which led me to mainly speak about the state if the market here. But I want to assure you, that I have seen similar situations all over the globe (the good, the bad and once again the ugly).
A lot of the time people ask me to make scoring for their projects. A lot of the time (when I don’t have the time to do the work) I answer, that the best judge is the market. When we open CMC, we see between 2-3 (depending on their price at the moment) CIS based projects in the top 200 (that is excluding the projects that started their work prior to 2016)… Recently, I had a phone call from China, and on the other end of the phone, my colleague asked me to name him “the 3 best CIS based projects that have an own blockchain”. So I told him i’d think about it, but as soon as I put the phone down, I realised that there were only 4….
Judge for yourself, let the market (as open and as honest as it can be, it is better than trusting a single entity) tell you whether the people who come into this market have any clue of how to work on this market. Do they have a product? Do they understand what is an “open blockchain”. Let the blockchain (that is an open source instrument) be your judge. According to our research, most CIS based projects simply lie about the money they have collected during their ICO. In 95% of the cases the collected summ is no more than 25% of the sum stated on the website (thats excluding sending money to yourself and also excluding what do those projects spend from the collected money ((on marketing)) prior to starting work)!
That is actually a very sad state of things, as the CIS market (just as the rest of the globe) contains very good projects. Unfortunately the way things are, it leads the rest of the planet not wanting to work with this end of the market.
What I wanted to show by the above, is that there are values, values just like they are in any field of work out there. And the blockchain has them too. As we can see, some seem to have forgotten those values and hopefully this article will help project creators to freshen up on those.
First of all, a “blockchain” means an “open blockchain”, that means that this is an open source and an open minded platform. One that doesn’t decide on which transactions it will stop and which transactions it will parse. This is the essence. A self authorising and a self verifiable blockchain. One that cannot be persuaded to judge a transaction based on its source of outcome.
A blockchain with open access, with no control and no censorship. A mathematically proven algorithm with no “single point” of control. An algorithm that is able to be called “routable”. “Routable” not for what one decides to route, but for anything that can be routed via that blockchain. That means, not controlling the network, not controlling the access to any parts of the project. Just like you wouldn’t control or hide any other information that was intended to be open in the first place.
A blockchain is meant to be borderless, global. It doesn’t have a patent. Anyone can come and innovate whenever and wherever he wants. This is not controlled by any single entity. That is what the true essence of decentralization means. This is what the ideology of the blockchain was fighting for in the first place.
Those are the core components that project starters within the blockchain should look up to, not to read between the lines of the bitcoin WP and not to read between the lines of the cypher punks philosophy that put a beginning to this paradigm.
In other words, if there was anything I could say to those people, that would be: “think” first of all. To think before you start a project. Think of the infrastructure that needs to be build first in the first place. Maybe the world simply is not ready (does not need) for what you are planning to do. Or maybe, it needs it, but not within the blockchain space.
So for now, it is definitely the following: “You don’t need a blockchain, thank you!”