Preston Byrne is a co-founder and COO of Eris Industries and a fellow of the Adam Smith Institute. Previously, he was a securitisation and derivatives lawyer with Norton Rose Fulbright in London and he continues to "geek out" on high finance. It’s been said the only way to win the game of life is for your obituary to run in The Economist. By that measure, the blockchain (or rather, the idea of a blockchain as a distributed database, rather than merely a backbone for a cryptocurrency) is certainly doing well.
This year alone, the blockchain has chalked up dozens (if not hundreds) of articles in most financial periodicals of record and the cover, no less, of The Economist . Even liberal culture hero Lawrence Lessig recently called the technology "the most important innovation in fundamental architecture since the tubes of the Internet were first developed".
I agree with this assessment, albeit cautiously. I was there when bitcoin’s earliest adopters were describing their technology in similarly high-flying terms (back in the heady days of Charlie Shrem and Mark Karpeles, before anyone noticed the three transaction-per-second throughput limits or before FinCEN got antsy about MSB licensing).
It’s the same now with blockchains.
Although the technology has considerable potential, given that so few people actually know how to build with it, there is a risk that failing to be sufficiently sober about its capabilities and straightforward about its drawbacks will lead us to apply it in ways that will not showcase this potential at its best.
I would therefore like to humbly offer a few sober and fairly boring predictions for 2016, in the hope that this puts everyone in a hype-free state of mind for the new year. 1. Nobody will own the stack
I’m often asked by journalists and VCs whether the blockchain game is […]
