Consensus Review

Consensus Was in one word …. Exhausting

Platforms for Platforms, consultants for consultants, there were plenty of handshakes to go around in what only can be described to be the modern reimagination of the California gold-rush. Optimism was strong and the force was with blockchain as a turnout of 8000 blockchain and cryptocurrency professionals, enthusiasts, technologists, academics, governments, regulators, skeptics, and shovel suppliers who are fueling the race.

People, and businesses were ‘banking’ on the future and promise of blockchain and cryptocurrency, with some forward thinking projects aiming to create DAO (Decentralized autonomous organizations) to solve society's problems of government with projects of Aragon, and, power, voting, healthcare; with no sight of slowing down.

Skeptics were welcome, as Jimmy Song brought a wakeup call, reminding everyone that ‘blockchain isn’t a magic powder to solve all your problems’ begging the question if enterprise/platform blockchain is more hope than promise; prompting what is to be the Bitcoin Bet of the Decade between Joe Lupin and Jimmy song on whether a blockchain enterprise solution will have a real applicable use case that a blockchain can solve in 5 years (Details to be hashed out on Twitter).

While the industry knows blockchain is the answer, everyone is searching enthusiastically and desperately for what is the question. Many of these businesses and solutions came were started in 2017 representing the growing mania of Cryptos with the recent market run up to BTC ~$19,783.06
Perhaps cryptocurrency as it stands may be the only true use case. Or maybe we are still chewing on blockchain adoption before we as a society can swallow it.
Companies like Deloitte and KPMG, though haven’t been active in the blockchain space, came into consensus hard almost creating the illusion that they were always there behind the scenes. We’ve created a new brand of middlemen and brokers to navigate this complex space of the decentralized and disintermediate technology at every level of business. Maybe we crave to do business more with people than with machines

Can we as Humans create a systems and organizations that are better than ourselves? Are we displacing our trust in blockchain to ‘experts’ that we need to write and interpreted the law, creating this insurmountable knowledge gap to be subordinated and subjugated to? Are these the ‘experts’ the Philosopher Kings in Plato’s Republic?

For a technology that is supposed to remove the middlemen and ‘end banks’, it seems to have created more jobs and middlemen as the blockchain super highway is under construction, as the market attempts to unify in a ‘Network of Networks’ rather than a ‘one Coin/Network to rule them all approach.’ Like roads, which are all integrated, yet maintained separately across states and municipality for a seamless driving experience; Partnerships with IBM, Stellar, Consensys, and Ripple seem to be on the table, as these network/road building highways are finding ways to link up. But are they building a road to a vacant dessert city, or to an oasis of promise and utopia? Or have we spent so much money making a bad tasting meal (blockchain product) that we are ultimately going to have to eat for dinner whether we like it or not, since there is no other way we can rationalize to ourselves the amount of time and money we spent on it. My personal stance is such, blockchain will remain since the optimism will continue, however are we solving ‘real’ problems with it, or are we causing more problems; are we answering more questions than we are asking?

I believe the goal of blockchain like any technology is to be so seamless that you don’t need to know how it works to use it; or as the saying goes, ‘You don’t need to know how a toilet works to use it’. Clearly blockchain and cryptos have a while to go before it’s so integrated in society, that the public isn’t aware they are even using it, creating the ultimate seamless technological experience of blockchain.