A mellow walk for a Friday night (from where I sit) that won’t break any brains!
Increasingly, I am confused by a common construct that Blockchain and Web 3 proponents follow when creating content.
Usually some shallow lines, thin details that end with “We’re still early”.
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So I started thinking about it a bit, because it doesn’t get beat or face criticism, so it must be a pretty common sight.
Blockchain was invented by a PhD candidate from the University of California at Berkeley named David Chaum.
He outlined a blockchain database in his thesis, “Computer Systems Established, Maintained, and Trusted by Mutually Suspicious Groups.” That was in 1982: 27 years before Bitcoin.
In my feature illustration, you will notice that there is nothing about blockchain at all. I have described some important milestones in the development of the “car”.
The building block of the car was the combustion engine (petrol). So we have three stages of progression – from the engine, to a hand-made car (Karl Benz) and on to the first mass-produced car, the Ford Model T.
The equivalent path to Web 3 is first Cryptography – a kind of ‘engine’ to Blockchain, then Blockchain and on to Web 3.
Remember that this comparison is hugely skewed in favor of Web 3. Car production is an energy-intensive, space-consuming and material-intensive physical process. Web 3 infrastructure is achieved through computing and virtual networks.
It’s a bit like trying to compare the lifespan of a human with the lifespan of a fly. The importance of a day in the life of a fly far exceeds the importance of a day in the life of a human being.
It is conservative to say that we should expect 10 years of development progress in blockchain technology for every year of development progress in automobiles.
The first known evidence of the use of cryptography was found in an inscription carved around 1900 BC, in the main chamber of the tomb of the nobleman Khnumhotep II, in Egypt.
An annoying factor is that there was no supporting technology in the early part of car development. Between Chaum 1982 and Bitcoin 2009, we have seen the arrival of PCs, the Internet and the smartphone.
We have seen the appearance of “higher level” (especially “OO” and scripting) languages that make coding much easier, which have included C, C++, Visual Basic, C#. Java. Javascript, PHP, Swift, Python, Ruby and Objective-C.
Newer languages have grown from them after Bitcoin, but it’s clear that blockchains didn’t miraculously emerge in the middle of a technology vacuum.
CEXs in particular have shown us the dangers of centralism in the mix…the problems with FTX, Luna, Celcius, Three Arrows Capital, etc. and now the SEC is taking an interest in Binance.
So what is meant to deliver us ‘Web 3’ has an excess of 4000 years of development track, and a 10/1 minimum time value advantage compared to the car track. The car has gone from ICE invention to mass production in 101 years (10/1 adjustment = 10.1 ‘Blockchain’ years!)
4000 years vs. 10.1 years, Web 3 as an ‘end-to-end decentralized UX’ nowhere in sight and probably more painful to come from points of centralization in the user journey.
Maybe if the combination of ‘community’ and corporate players can’t agree and get things done, we’ll have to bring in Chat GPT and finish the job!
Because no…. We are EVERYTHING BUT still early!
9yes Cosmos is here…
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All reference pages accessed between 17/02/2003
redhat.com/en/blog/brief-history-cryptography
cryptomat.io/blockchain/history-of-blockchain
www.timetoast.com/timelines/119691
i.pinimg.com/originals/75/66/14/756614b545c0a0b7da65910bf18dd223.jpg
mark-havens.medium.com/the-top-programming-languages-of-the-2000s-a-retrospective-a14c894f1d42
