"Let's be realistic."
This is a statement rooted in ego.
Sound odd? Actually it is not.
There is absolutely no way to know what is realistic or not. And no I am not talking about living in simulations or a computer game although I guess that is possible.
What I am saying is there is no way we can know the potential or cryptocurrency, blockchain, and a host of other technologies and how they are going to change the world. I can tell you that we are set, based upon the study of technological cycles, for a major boom in this area. We saw it in the 1980s and 1990s with the time upon us again.
People are trying to predict what the future will look like. We can do this with a degree of accuracy in the short-term. This gets more difficult as we go further out.
If we go back to the late 1980s, do you think it was "realistic" to consider that people would be walking around with handheld devices that had access to most of the information in the world? Go back to the 1970s, how realistic does that look?
Since the 1960s, flying cars were a total dream; something completely unrealistic. How does it look now? The probability has increased a bit over the last decade.
For those who are fans of Game of Thrones, that show is set before the advent of the printing press. Do you think those people would have considered global book production to be realistic? When we were an agricultural society, was a digital economy based upon realism?
The answer is no to all these questions. Yet, today, for us, most of that is realism. It is a part of our daily life. Of course, the difference with the example I mentioned is they took place over decades or, even, centuries.
Paradigms shifts do take time to unfold. Changes in society are slow, until they are not. I read the Smart Phone achieved 70% penetration in the United States in under 7 years. This was a societal shift that took place that is measured in years.
I remember when computers came out, the most logical use case was to replace typewriters. The known entity was document creation and computers provided word processing. Was it realistic to consider that we would be using these all the things we do today?
Can you tell me how we will be using computers in 25 years? Neither can I. What I can tell you is that whatever we are doing with them, it is unrealistic in our eyes today.
Too many people think the world they know is going to remain. It is not. We are seeing things being developed that are going to radically alter how we do things. At the core of this, in my opinion, is blockchain. The advent of cryptocurrency is going to change our entire monetary system and creation of value.
This might see unrealistic to people. What I write about here is based upon years of studying technology and the advancement of it. Can I guarantee these things will come about? Of course not. I do, however, see the potential with the paradigm shift that is already underway. Coupling that with technological progress, some reasonable, albeit unrealistic, conclusions can be drawn.
We are at the "word processing" phase with these technologies. What we are doing is replacing what we already know with something that is blockchain based. We replace fiat money with cryptocurrency. On Steem, we develop social media applications that are meant to eliminate the centralized ones.
Word processing replacing typewriters.
What we do not know is the social media phase for these technologies. What are some of the use cases on Steem and other ecosystems that we cannot even envision at this moment yet will be a part of our daily lives in a decade or two?
The truth is we honestly do not know how things are going to turn out. History does tell us we tend to underestimate the technology in the long term for the reason I just explained. Since we compare it to what we do know, the don't know is not even considered. That is what ends up being societal changing.
My view is the pace is accelerating now. We have much faster tools which to implement developments. There is also a global community that is adding to the progress each day. This will grow as more people come online.
While it looks like all innovation is in the hands of the major corporations, it appears they are the ones actually hindering it. Today, there are millions hacking away on laptops creating some incredible things.
We truly can only ponder where cryptocurrency is going to take us. Having the ability to reward and incentivize is very powerful. It is also something that is completely new. Never before could anyone create a currency and start to generate use cases for it. What we saw take place the last few years is only the tip of the iceberg. Humanity is going to come up with a lot more uses for this stuff.
Could this entire thing collapse? It is possible. Cryptocurrency could end up being added to the long line of promising technologies that did not quite work out. I find it unlikely simply due to the fact so many people are already developing on it. With tens of millions of people around the world, the future seems forward, not back.
Where will Steem or cryptocurrency/blockchain be in a decade or two? If they do succeed, which I think there is a great chance, it will be beyond our present comprehension.
Basically, what we will be using it for then is unrealistic today.
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