What Blockchain and Google Maps Have In Common And What We Can Expect Next
The following is adapted from Bitcoin Pizza: The No-Bullshit Guide to Blockchain.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Or, to put it another way, which came first, the cryptocurrency or the infrastructure? The answer to that question isn’t as clear cut as it first appears. The natural response is to think that an infrastructure needs to be set up and established before applications can be built out. But the process is far more iterative and not nearly as linear as it seems.
The classic example is the light bulb, which was invented before the electric grid was put in place. The electric grid wasn’t necessary to light up a light bulb: electricity could be generated locally. However, it was necessary to build electric grids before broader consumer adoption of light bulbs was possible. Broad consumer adoption then led to a profusion of new and different kinds of light bulbs.
Similarly, airplanes were invented before airports, but airports were required before airplanes and air travel could be widely adopted. All evolutionary processes seem to follow the same pattern.
A more recent and perhaps more relevant example is the internet itself. Basic internet protocols like TCP/IP were in place before the internet was widely adopted by the general public. During the technology’s evolution, there was a mutually reinforcing feedback loop between its infrastructural and application layers. Once the web browsers that made it possible for the average person to use the internet arrived, setting off a series of competitive “browser wars,” new consumer applications were proposed that required further infrastructural development before becoming truly viable. Internet service providers led to web portals, which led to search engines and then e-commerce applications like Amazon.
The Blockchain Development Cycle
How is the above relevant to blockchain? It can give us a glimpse into the possible path of what is still a very new technology.
We’re still early in the blockchain development cycle. New applications will be built that require further infrastructure and protocol development. These iterative cycles will continue to move exponentially in an upward trajectory, but there will be losers as well as winners, and many “learning experiences” on this evolutionary journey. Some applications and protocols will emerge as a gold standard, while others will fade into irrelevance.
Since this is an iterative process, we really have no idea how it is going to develop. The “fortune tellers” who claim to know are just that. No one can predict the future. Twenty years ago, who could have fathomed, much less predicted, what Google, Facebook, and Amazon would become?
By way of comparison, consider MapQuest. In the late nineties and early 2000s, MapQuest was queen. You could go to its website, enter two locations, and get directions. You printed them out, referred to them while driving, then stuffed them into your glove compartment, adding to the accumulating mess.
Fast-forward to 2005. Google Maps, a similar mapping and directions tool, entered the market. Yet it was different. It wasn’t just a better map. It launched its API, which allowed other developers to use and build on top of its data. Within a few years, we saw the rise of the demand economy. We saw Uber. We saw Lyft. In short order, we saw the various offshoots: “Uber for food delivery,” “Uber for dog walking,” “Uber for companionship,” “Uber for doctors on demand,” “Uber for ____________.” You fill in the blank.
Why is this important? When Google created Google Maps, the world was still thinking in terms of MapQuest and printing out directions on sheets of paper. People thought that a MapQuest digital map was an innovation, and it was. However, it was still a restricted, linear way to think about the implications of real-time location data. The world was still thinking in terms of creating a “better map.” MapQuest didn’t see the possibilities for the Ubers, the Airbnbs, the food delivery services, and the “on-demand” economy, which would totally reshape our lives. Google Maps did.
If you had asked the MapQuest folks what their customers wanted, they would have said a better map. No one could have predicted that, in 2005, with the launch of Google Maps and their open approach to an API for sharing real-time location data, we would see the rise of an entire generation of unicorn tech companies: Uber, Lyft, Yelp, Airbnb, Delivery.com, Grubhub — the list goes on. The paradigm shift that enabled people to see a map as dynamic rather than static ushered in the entire “on-demand” economy.
We’re at an analogous place today with blockchain. At the moment, there is confusion about which developments belong in the infrastructure and which in the application categories. The point is that these categories, while important, are far from hard-and-fast.
Blockchain and the Fourth Industrial Revolution
It’s critical to recognize that blockchain and cryptocurrency are part — an essential part — of the greater seismic sociocultural, geopolitical, economic, and technological shifts now taking place. Blockchain is not simply a new technology — a MapQuest — it’s a new way of seeing, understanding, and interacting with the world — a Google Maps. As such, we can’t yet know for sure where it will take us.
Collectively, the shift of which blockchain is part is often referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This shift encompasses advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, additive manufacturing, the Internet of Things, robotics, and genomics.
The convergence of these technologies will impact the future of production, work, community, commerce, and everything in between. It’s impossible to understand what’s happening by reducing the interactions among all these technologies to a simple, two-dimensional map. What’s occurring is multidimensional and therefore hard to fathom.
This unique historical moment represents the convergence not just of multiple technologies, but of new ideas. Our thinking will shift from centralized to decentralized, opaque to transparent, siloed to open, reactive to proactive, and regulated to self-enforcing.
When I look at the greater evolution of thought taking place at the current moment, a term like “Fourth Industrial Revolution” doesn’t seem to do this seismic paradigm shift justice. Perhaps the last time in human history we saw so significant a shift was the Paleolithic revolution, when humans took the evolutionary step of making and wielding tools. All subsequent revolutions, from the agrarian to the industrial to the internet revolution, represent accelerations of existing tool making.
The revolution we are now experiencing represents an evolution of thought and therefore requires us to conceive of and build new tools. If you don’t buy that blockchain, as a technology, will be the backbone of this change, at least try to understand that it is a manifestation of a much larger evolutionary sociocultural process.
What will the next infrastructure-application matrix — the next light-bulb-and-energy-grid feedback loop — consist of? My sense is that what will emerge will include not only specific solutions or applications, but new ways of doing business and making transactions, along with new organizational and governance models.
This could have implications for voting and government, even including the demise of the concept of the nation-state, which our globalized and connected context seems to have rendered outdated. We just don’t know, except that we do know fundamental transformation will take place at many different levels.
Very little in this new, unfamiliar world appears certain. What does seem clear is that, given what we’ve already seen in the multiple rises and collapses of various cryptocurrencies and blockchain networks, it’s going to be a wild ride.
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Hungry for more? For more insights on how emerging technologies like blockchain will impact your business and daily life, be sure to check out Samantha Radocchia’s #1 Best Selling book — Bitcoin Pizza: The No-Bullshit Guide to Blockchain
This article first appeared in Minutes.
Samantha Radocchia is an early blockchain pioneer and advocate who combines the mindsets of an anthropologist and a technologist. She’s led corporate trainings at Fortune 100 companies, governments, and the United Nations, educating leaders on the technologies and cultural shifts that will shape their organizations — and daily lives — in the decades to come. Sam is a contributor to Forbes and was named to their 30 Under 30 List in 2017. A three-time entrepreneur, Sam holds several patents and is a cofounder of Chronicled, an enterprise blockchain company focused on supply chain. She now consults executives on emerging