2008 handed us one of the greatest economic crises in history. It also gifted us with the idea of a disintermediated currency, Bitcoin, and introduced us to blockchain, or the ability to track and secure digital transactions on a shared ledger, without the risk of ‘double spending’. A true revolution. Nearly fifteen years have passed since Satoshi Nakamoto’s famous Bitcoin paper[1], or whoever he or she was – or even they were (one theory points to the founding group of Ethereum as the brain behind Satoshi), and despite the current cryptocurrency market downturn, Bitcoin is firmly above $25,000, while Coinbase reports that 52% of ‘Fortune 100’ companies have already adopted or have concrete plans on blockchain[2] . Not bad for a world thought as dead, many times over. But what remains of that initial intentions? What is the uniqueness of that revolution, which, like all changes with exponential technologies, is slower and more progressive than what the newspapers or social media discussions state.
We dwell on three changes – and we simplify here – that will stay with us for years to come, all of which arose from the reflections of Satoshi & Friends:
- The need for a digital payment instrument, accessible to the entire global community, usable for micropayments and free from the taxes and fees of the traditional financial system. Bitcoin was intended to be a value-sharing tool, unassailable and parallel to the financial world that continued to favor the few. The current behind-the-scenes work to devise more streamlined payment instruments, such as Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), anchored, however, to reference fiat currencies to avoid their extreme volatility, testifies to how much the traditional banking system has failed to reach the entire global population, or is not suited to meet the needs of a target audience that moves in an immersive, instantaneous digital world made up of billions of micro interactions between verified and anonymous users (think gaming or marketing).
- Complete mastery and monetization of one’s activities in the digital sphere. Ownership comes with accountability, precisely because everything is tracked on a shared ledger. The blockchain has opened the field to the possibility of putting oneself out there and being rewarded surgically and proportionately for one’s efforts to consolidate the community, or – if we want to use more advanced language – to increase the social capital behind Bitcoin or any other blockchain project; the stronger the network, the more liquid and solid the native cryptocurrency of reference will be. The strength of the projects of Animoca Brands, for example, which invented gaming on blockchain, is based precisely on the old idea of building a community, which participates, but wants to be rewarded for its ‘digital agency’.
- The programmability of the blockchain, which is one of the revolutions of Ethereum, and here we go full circle, is the element that will allow transactions to be handled ad personam, with minimal risk of error or fraud. The programmability of a transaction, be it a reward or a payment, upon the occurrence of certain conditions, all of which are coded upfront, makes blockchain the essential tool for making any supply chain more efficient. A traceable, automatic, and instantly payable transaction improves the productivity of a luxury supply chain, for example, in the double-digit percentage range.
The world was different in 2008, when Satoshi & Friends envisioned a new digital frontier. Today’s world owes them an infrastructure for designing flows that are efficient, traceable, programmable, and infallible in rewarding even the micro. It is a long march, the fruits of which we will see in the decades to come.
[1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
[2] https://www.coinbase.com/blog/insights-from-the-state-of-crypto-summit
