Understanding blockchain technology is not for the average person. This is level 10,000 on the nerd scale. Which makes for a sizable challenge if you’re a startup trying to build a business based on a technology most people will struggle to comprehend.
Here at TechCrunch Disrupt London 2015 a panel of blockchain experts was asked to come up with alternative terms to help unpack some of the complexity.
Steve Waterhouse, a partner at blockchain and Bitcoin investment firm Pantera Capital, had the most compact and accessible suggestion — offering the single word: ‘decentralized’.
Vitalik Buterin, founder of independent blockchain platform Ethereum, plumped for ‘crypto 2.0′. Which probably isn’t much less techie than blockchain, if we’re keeping count.
Austin Hill, co-founder and CEO of Blockstream, which builds sidechains — aka “parallel blockchains that are interoperable” — initially objected to the entire exercise, dubbing it “somewhat marketing games”. Which is exactly the point. The complexity of blockchain is going to need some shiny marketing gloss applied on top of it if mainstream consumers are going to be persuaded to trust their home insurance to a blockchain-based insurance provider, for instance, or their life-savings to a decentralized bank.
Hill’s eventual suggestions were “distributed ledger technology” and “programmable trust infrastructure”. So still pretty dense concepts there.
Although, earlier in the panel, he also described blockchain as a “massive decentralized trust machine”, which starts to sound a little more approachable.
Marketing blockchain to the masses is clearly going to take more than one ten-minute brainstorming session.“The general approach to thinking about blockchains is programmable trust infrastructure,” said Hill. “Because you can really start to program your trust in the rules or the concept and that’s one of the key benefits, because you can remove systemic risk.“The blockchain acts as a real-time a-priority audit mechanism. And when you start to get into […]
