Contributed by Chaz Luciano
SingularDTV hit the streets over weekend to find out what New Yorkers know about Ethereum. As you can probably guess, the random NYC sidewalkers don’t have a clue. We don’t think this is a bad thing at all.
Straight to the point; the general population has no direct interest in whether or not Ethereum becomes the de facto public blockchain. Market share is won at the level of developers/content producers. At present, the EVM’s value is to the dev, who can then pass it on to consumers and undercut non-blockchain competition.
Perhaps it makes zero difference whether Joe Schmo has heard of Ethereum? He doesn’t know whether he paid Sony, Universal or Warner for the last album he bought, doesn’t care whether his 4G signal is WiMAX or LTE — those are just platforms for the things he wants to buy.
To SingularDTV, Ethereum is a revolution, a movement into a new decentralized paradigm. It’s all about finding ways to take centralized assets and decentralize them as efficiently as possible. But to the average future user, Ethereum is probably just a platform for things people want to buy and use.
The way to grow a platform is to fill it with things people want to use and make it easy for them to buy. Lemonade got everyone to sign up for Tidal, but the app’s shortfalls made sure everyone fled once the free trial expired.
Ethereum can’t make the same mistake as Tidal. Perhaps there is no reason to invite the common user in at this point? The past year has seen great strides made in accessibility, but there is still a ways to go before the Ethereum ecosystem resembles anything near approachable to the average end-user. In the mean time, the best way to grow the community is to contribute to development in the space, make it so that when the end-users do arrive, there is a ton of useful stuff for them to enrich their lives. SingularDTV’s entertainment content will start rolling out this December in the form of Ethereum-centric documentaries, and Singular our sci-fi TV series will launch the Summer of 2017.
Does anyone else think that trying to explain Ethereum to the layperson is premature? Or do we need to make the effort to convert them in whatever manner possible, one at a time if we have to?